Title is TLDR. More info about what I'm trying to do below.
My daily driver computer is Laptop with an SSD. No possibility to expand.
So for storage of lots n lots of files, I have an old, low resource Desktop with a bunch of HDDs plugged in (mostly via USB).
I can access Desktop files via SSH/SFTP on the LAN. But it can be quite slow.
And sometimes (not too often; this isn't a main requirement) I take Laptop to use elsewhere. I do not plan to make Desktop available outside the network so I need to have a copy of required files on Laptop.
Therefor, sometimes I like to move the remote files from Desktop to Laptop to work on them. To make a sort of local cache. This could be individual files or directory trees.
But then I have a mess of duplication. Sometimes I forget to put the files back.
Seems like Laptop could be a lot more clever than I am and help with this. Like could it always fetch a remote file which is being edited and save it locally?
Is there any way to have Laptop fetch files, information about file trees, etc, located on Desktop when needed and smartly put them back after editing?
Or even keep some stuff around. Like lists of files, attributes, thumbnails etc. Even browsing the directory tree on Desktop can be slow sometimes.
I am not sure what this would be called.
Ideas and tools I am already comfortable with:
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rsync is the most obvious foundation to work from but I am not sure exactly what would be the best configuration and how to manage it.
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luckybackup is my favorite rsync GUI front end; it lets you save profiles, jobs etc which is sweet
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freeFileSync is another GUI front end I've used but I am preferring lucky/rsync these days
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I don't think git is a viable solution here because there are already git directories included, there are many non-text files, and some of the directory trees are so large that they would cause git to choke looking at all the files.
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syncthing might work. I've been having issues with it lately but I may have gotten these ironed out.
Something a little more transparent than the above would be cool but I am not sure if that exists?
Any help appreciated even just idea on what to web search for because I am stumped even on that.
Funny you found that card as I have the same one. I would only spend the extra money if your computer doesn't have enough sata ports.
For raid you do not want hardware raid. It is generally problematic and doesn't have any error correction. Also, if the controller were to die you could be in trouble.
The reason I say TrueNAS is that it makes the setup pretty straight forward. I have never used cockpit for file shares so I do not know if it works well or not. I do no it will require more setup and maintenance. For the software you could setup either a btrfs or ZFS raid 1 config. TrueNAS is ZFS only but it is turned for solid performance in a single job.
The reason I say raid 1 is not because it is a backup. Raid is not a backup and should not be treated as such. What it can offer is reduced downtime. If one drive fails you can simply swap out the drive. If you do not have a redundant copy you either need to recreate the data from a backup or try to do a data recovery operation. I would also recommend that you turn on snapshots as if it really handy to be able to roll back a change quickly. Snapshots are not complete backups but they are a form of version control.
As far as DDR3 goes, it is pretty slow and will not be able to come close to saturating a gigabit connection. Prepare to have slow speeds unfortunately. The good news is that if you get this setup and later decide it is time to upgrade then you can.