I want a server running nextcloud, immich and others.
I have a N100 mini server with a 2TB external HDD. I want to secure the system against data loss. Hence, I want a backup and redundancy.
-
Most important question: How do I build everything? Is this a NAS? My naive approach is to buy 3 external HDDs and connect them to the N100 with a USB hub. I assume this is not “the right way” but to use/build a NAS. Do I have to build a separate NAS computer? When I lookup NAS buying, it is a computer with a case for 4 drives, excluding the drives and costs 400 bucks. I am confused because this is incredibly expensive compared to what I already have. What is the additional benefit compared to my setup? Am I cheap?
-
Regarding redundancy, is RAID still the way to go? At 2 TB, using RAID 5 with 3 drives sounds good. I’d have 4 TB of usable space, much more than I intend to use in the next years, and adding a drive increases the storage by 2 TB, effectively increasing space by 50%.
-
I have 4 TB usable space, but I won’t reach 2 TB in the next one or two years. I’d use a 2 TB HDD for a local backup via borg. Once my hot storage needs to increase, I replace the backup drive with a larger one and use it to increase the RAID storage. Is one backup sufficient? Or should I keeping multiple versions of the data. Daily, weekly, monthly backups? What is your experience with it?
-
Another 2 TB HDD for an offsite backup, LUKS encrypted, backed up once a year (that’s the goal for now).
Does that sound good?
The main advantages of Kopia, are speed and destination flexibility.
The off-site storage does not need to have Kopia installed. It can be a mounted network location, an FTP server. Whatever. A generic cloud storage bucket like Backblaze B2.
That’s why just a router with and external drive hooked up is able to suffice.
For all of these, you can connect multiple Kopia instances to that same destination, and each client can browse backups, restore from them, and backup their own files to the destination. It even performs file deduplication across different source device. All while that destination device or service, has no access to your encrypted files.
With borg, you need something like a Pi that can have borg installed. (You can also do this with Kopia, in which case the Kopia instance on the destination device is also able to manage the backups).
Kopia also beats borg and restic in speed. My daily backups typically complete within a minute or two. I used to use Duplicati, with which it was common for it to take up to an hour. When it started regularly taking more than an hour, I switched to Kopia.
Kopia is not the fastest for initial backup. The speed of this varies depending on destination type. It does not compress by default, but you can enable almost any type of compression you want. No, what it is fastest at is updating backups. If there is nothing to update, it does not take forever for it to figure that out. Kopia does it in seconds.
thanks! I installed it and created my first backup. I’ll test it and see how it goes. It looks good. Thank you!
I can’t find anything related to systemd or cron. Does it have its own scheduler? I already set policies. I’m just wondering if I forgot something to setup.
Depends. If you are running it as a service that starts with the system (
sudo sysemctl enable kopiashould work with most install methods, as kopia comes with a systemd service you only need to enable) then yes, it will use its own scheduler.If you want to use your own scheduling, you’d use anything that can execute a command on a schedule.