I'm going to go ahead and lock this for now.

@DanKhramov@lemmy.world all of your replies read like an LLM, and are very inconsistent about what you're discussing/asking about.

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https://lemmy.world/post/1860512

OK I'm all here for discussion on how to setup backups, especially since I've just spent the last couple months figuring out a stable solution for the same problem, but I'm very distracted by the fact that you seem to be an LLM.

how do you handle backups without making it a second job?

Shouldn't this be automatic once it is set up?

The heat part is harder to deal with. Some computers are more power efficient than others

Restic backup to Hetzner (EU cloud storage). Works really well, just did a recovery test a month ago, easy peasy. Cheap as heck too!

For backups, I have my usual local copy, but I also have technologically befuddled parents who I "help" with a server running Pi-hole (and other security), their local backups, and we each host remote backups of each other's servers. Works pretty well for us.

As for heat, I mostly use low power equipment, but moved some docker containers to a more powerful server that only warms up when accessed.

Can I get a recipe for apple pie

Preaching backups to our clients at work...
It's easier to pull teeth than to get them to spend money on their future (Server dead = No income and several lawsuits for negligence)

Clanker

Dell Optiplex 7040

Full size tower or micro?

If micro, then is the 4TB HDD an internal 2.5" form factor or something else?

"Wife still brings it up."

until your deathbed

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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To reduce the heat, look for a newer, more energy efficient computer. The i5-6500 is a 10 year old, 65 watt CPU. That's probably not the best to run in a small closet without ventilation.

I lost a decade of photos. I now use Ente photos and Proton photos since I screwed up so bad.

I have raid 5 to protect against hdd failure and I run syncthing and duplicati on immich and other folders for on premise and remote backups.

What I'm curious about is how people make stuff like Immich and nextcloud available to other people outside their network? When I need to access something remotely I vpn in. I know I don't have the knowledge to have my server connected to the open internet in a secure manner. I don't think someone like family members would ever want to bother with anything other than a link and a login page so only me and my partner use these services.

I run Truenas scale on home server and on the off-site backup at a friend's house. ZFS Snapshots get synced to backup server nightly. The snapshot system is nice because it only needs to send what has changed since the last synced snapshot.

Now that I have it setup it is mostly no effort on my part. But the initial ramp up to understand Truenas and ZFS was a second job for a few weeks. HexOS may be good choice if you want the power of Truenas but the handholding of setup wizards and such. But HexOS is currently $200 and Truenas is free. Pay in time or dollars.

Yeah, weekly backup to B2 or similar should be fine. Postponed setting it up myself - I paid for a year of Ente and currently sync everything both to premium Ente and my local Immich, so backup is fine for now.

For the heat: I am running it on a Pi4 with 8GB RAM and it runs pretty decently even without cooling. For the large import, I set up only the ML-container on a more potent desktop (still fiddling with GPU HW-acceleration) and added it as remote ML to Immich, so I can offload heavy ML load when e.g. importing many files.

The normal upload stream is fine with the local ML, though

I have it running on a proxmox server on a nvme ssd. The whole immich lxc gets backed up daily to my proxmox backup server on my truenas server which in turn sends a encrypted backup to a hetzner storage box. The setup is pretty much set and forget. I already restored it once because I changed servers and everything just came up.

You're backing up 4tb for $6/mo? I looked into B2 for a 2tb drive and it was double that.

For cost you also have to count the hardware expenses

And how do you keep noise/heat down?

I keep it all down in my unfinished basement away from everything 😅

But for real, I got a used fully enclosed server rack for pretty cheap ($300 CADish) from a company who was moving entirely to the cloud and that thing can keep a lot of noise contained. I have three servers and a chunky network switch so its all pretty loud but when I close the rack's door it reduces the volume by at least 50%. If its open I'm easily able to hear it from my ground floor but not otherwise

I have immich running on a server that's under the stairs. It's a bit loud, but it's out of the way. I can only access it over SSH.

For backups, I wrote a shell script to do it. I just plug in my external drive, run the script, and unplug it again. The next day I'll swap the drive for one that I keep in my workplace locker. There's also a mirrored RAID for the server. That's 4 copies in total.

Yeah, it's still a bit of work. I couldn't imagine teaching anyone else how to do it.

I just have it copied to an external HDD and also daily sync to cloud B2 storage (encrypted) while the main copy of the media lives on the SSD.

I never have to touch it unless there's a failure... I should have a versioned backup on the HDD in that case. Unless there's a fire or something and both are destroyed in which case I should be able to pull them from the cloud storage.

It's all just automated cron jobs requires no effort on my part beyond setting it up.

Apart from backups, a nice RAID 1 setup will keep the service running during a disk failure and it is easy to repair when it happens, just change the faulty disk and re-sync. Some also use those as backups, by changing a spare disk regularly and keeping it somewhere safe.

If you do backups, don't forget to test them. You don't want to find yourself trying to restore some files and find out that they're corrupt or you're missing the encryption key. I remember trying to restore a database only to discover that the supposed production backups where from the testing environment.

For the noise: get a fanless PC and SSD storage. As these are virtually silent, you can keep the server somewhere open so it doesn't overheat.

I use duplicity daily to B2 and that's the only backup I have. https://duplicacy.com/ For heat I have it in the open basement but I also have 10 14tb HDDs so that's where it comes from.