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.

  1. 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?

  2. 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%.

  3. 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?

  4. 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?

  • selfmate@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    all good. thanks for exchanging our experience :)

    kopia wasn’t running durin the week. I didn’t look into the server configuration since it introduces user handling and that seemed to be overkill for the task but running as daemon would lead to a funcitoning system of course.

    this is my kopia.service file in case some else finds it and is interested in it

    [Unit]

    Description=kopia backup

    [Service]

    User=root ExecStart=$HOME/bin/backup_kopia

    [Install]

    WantedBy=multi-user.target

    where $HOME/bin/backup_kopia contains

    #!/bin/bash

    /usr/bin/kopia repository connect filesystem --path $KOPIA_REPO --password $KOPIA_PASSWORD

    /usr/bin/kopia snapshot create $HOME/folder_to_backup

    and my kopia.timer

    [Unit]

    Description=Run kopia backup

    [Timer]

    OnCalendar=hourly

    Persistent=true

    [Install]

    WantedBy=timers.target