[lug] (Small) Network backup recommendations

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Mon, 2021-05-24 at 08:24 -0600, Mike Witt wrote:
> Any recommendations for a small network backup device?
> 
> I've got a mixture of two or three linux machines and one or two  
> windows machines. If I add up all the USB sticks I'm currently
> backing  
> them up to it only comes to about 5 TB.

I've have slightly smaller backup requirements but have lots of stored
data, such as 1000ish ripped DVDs and at least 4 home servers.  The
easiest solution, IMHO, is a Raspberry Pi with a powered USB hub and
10TB disks.  For your situations a single 10TB USB drive is plenty for
now and into (at least) the near future.  Note that I'm not going for
speed here, just storage size.  I don't backup to the cloud because
they can change ownership and, thereby, policies and rules.  It's too
easy NOT to use the cloud for this.

Right now I do backups to a CentOS box running on an AMD, but that
system is 10+ years old and dying.  I have the DVDs served from a RPi
running Raspbian.  I'm building a custom RPi with a TFT display (the
size of the board) to be my file server for backups and DVDs that will
run my PiBox distribution.  That's overkill for you but just plucking
Raspbian on a Pi should be sufficient.  Then just export everything
with NFS and/or Samba.

I use rsync to backup all my boxes.  Not sure what windows has.  But
with such small needs and the relatively low cost of the 10TB drives
now you could easily just dup the backup drive (even putting it on
another RPi) to make extra certain nothing goes wrong.  

Easy peasy.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org
michaelhammel at acm.org