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If your N100 mini server has an ITX motherboard with several SATA ports then changing the case to something like a Jonsbo N2 might be a solution that works better than USB.
next time with more SATA ports, thx!
Sounds like you should look at N3 and N4 then. :)
I'll do that, thx!
Lot to unpack, just a quick answer:
- Don't do that, forget the USB hub it's unreliable, if you absolutely want to go with the USB route get something like a HDD multi bay enclosure: https://sabrent.com/collections/hard-drive-accessories/products/ds-sc4b But if you don't want to fiddle with things get a ready made solution (qnap, synology, ugreen, etc) you get the hardware and the software, just insert the disks and you are ready to go.
- If you are doing DIY look into ZFS, or use the solution from the software you are using, Unraid for example.
- The usual advice is to do the 3-2-1 backup (three copies of your data across two different storage types with one off-site), but entirely depends on you and your data, keep at least a separate copy of your most important things.
- Sounds good.
thx, I'll look into it!
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There is no "special" benefit to a pre-built NAS. They have convenient software but there is nothing exceptional about them. They're just computers with storage drive slots. Using a bunch of external drives via a USB hub would be fine. But is that your only expansion option on the system you have? Access speeds via USB, especially if using a hub, won't be ideal. It'll certainly work, though. You can also get enclosures to put full size HDDs in, which can connect to an existing system.
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RAID is still the way to go, but since you don't need much storage, I'd start with RAID 1, not 5. 5 will require a rebuild with a new drive if something goes wrong, while RAID 1 will work with 2 drives and give you complete mirroring. Since you intend to have a "local" backup copy anyway, why not just skip that and use RAID 1? It's literally the same thing, except it'll actually provide uptime in case of failure, unlike a backup drive or raid 5.
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So RAID 5 plus a local backup, plus another offsite? This is overkill IMO. (Not the offsite backup that's good. But raid+local copy. Just use two drives and mirror them using whatever you prefer.) In your place, I think I'd go with BTRFS in raid1c2 mode. This is like raid1, in that with two drives, you only get the capacity of one drive. But, the "c2" means that each data block is mirrored to two drives. With more than two drives, you can expand storage. (With three 2TB drives you'd get 3TB) You don't get as much available storage as with raid5, but you get expandability, which you normally don't with raid1. And you get uptime in case of failure without an array rebuild (though for this you must mount the volume with the "degraded" option, unlike actual raid using mdadm). You also get filesystem snapshots.
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You intend to do this manually? That is fine. My current solution is a second NAS at my dad's home, to which my system is backed up daily using Kopia. Kopia deduplicates and compresses the backups, efficiently keeping versions up to two years back. The simplest version of this would be a router that can host an FTP server using an external drive in its usb port. This way you could automate off-site backup and have it happen more frequently. Asus routers can do this, and even come with free dynamic DNS and automatic https with letsenrypt. You literally just plug it into WAN somewhere, and you'll be able to back up to it over the internet.
Finally, just some mentions.
MDADM, is what you'd use to create a software RAID array.
BTRFS has built-in multi-device storage, of which only single, raid0, and raid1 are stable. Do not use the raid5 and 6 modes. While named raid, the modes differ from actual raid. BTRFS is able to convert from one mode to another, and can add drives in any mode (though will need to "balance" the drives after changes, to make additional capacity available). It is also able to evict drives. It will not auto-mount a volume after drive failure, and requires the "degraded" option be added.
Mergerfs can be used to merge filesystems to expand storage non-destructively. It is able to arbitrarily combine volumes of any type, to combine their capacity. This way, it can for example be used to expand a raid1 array by combining it with a single disk, or another raid1 array, or whatever else. This can be done temporarily, as the combined volume can also be disassembled non-destructively, with each file simply remaining on whatever drive they were on.
is that your only expansion option on the system you have?
For now, yes, that's the only option. I'll look into internal drives the next time.
thanks for the info about RAID 1 and BTRFS in raid1c2
I'll look into kopia as well since I only knew about borg.
I am using mergerfs for years, it's really neat.
thanks for sharing all of that!
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 kopia should 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.
Thank you!
I couldn't find a systemd unit or service.
Kopia will then automatically begin taking the snapshot following the settings you set for the policy. link
I'm not yet sure about that
How did you install kopia? What system are you on?
I'm not yet sure about that
It needs to be running, if it is, it will follow the policy. Systemd can start it with the system, but you can also start it some other way. Or you can execute snapshots without it constantly running, via cron/script. It's up to you.
It's a fedora server.
according to kopia's repo, there is no official systemd service https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/2685 and there is none on my system.
in the past week, it did not backup anything. Hence, there is no scheduler built into kopia automagically as described/ hinted in the docs.
I just wrote a systemd service and timer and I'll see if it works. I'm not the best in using systemd. I dislike it, I like cron for it's simplicity.
Even if it works then, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because info about the scheduler is rare and the docs do not even cover the topic.
Sorry, I must've misremembered about systemd. It's how my installs start up, and the unit file is not in the usual location for systemd units I've created myself, so my assumption was it came with Kopia. There is no systemd timer though, and one isn't needed.
Edit: Just confirmed no systemd file came with kopia on my system either, my mistake.
in the past week, it did not backup anything. Hence, there is no scheduler built into kopia automagically as described/ hinted in the docs.
Was Kopia running during that time?
If you run a Kopia command, then it will perform the instructed task, and then exit. It will obviously not do anything after completing whatever command was given, as the process will have exited, leaving no kopia process running on the system. This is for when you use it in cron or your own scripts.
The other way of doing things is to run it in server mode kopia server start, which will set it running as a background daemon. When running, it allows you to log into the web interface or configure it via cli to do whatever you like. And as long as the process starts along with the host system, that's all there is to it.
How the daemon is set up to start, doesn't really matter.
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
the backup is working
I think that sounds pretty solid to me. Realistically you should count on having 3x drives for your important data:
- The main data drive(s)
- Drive(s) for redundancy, mirroring the data drives. (I use btrfs RAID1 for this.).
- Offline local hard drive(s) that you keep somewhere relatively safe that you occasionally backup to.
- (Optionally) Some kind of offsite backup.
So if you plan on having 2TB of data, you'll ideally want 3x 2TB drives. 2 in the PC mirroring eachother, and 1 in a closet or safe that you plug in and backup to a few times per year. (With bonus points if you can get another 2TB of off site or cloud storage to also backup to, in case of catastrophy.)
As for how you build it, I think it doesn't matter too much. Its possible to use whatever random spare PC parts you have to make a decent home server, imo. A lot of people on YouTube and Reddit have all kinds of fancy servers in a rack, but an old repurposed desktop can be fine. ( I would probably use new, decent quality drives though.)
thank, that's good to read!
Depending on the board in your mini-server, you may have enough SATA ports to plug in directly. I have a system similar to what you're describing (N100 with 4x 2TB HDDs with 1.5TB data): 2 of those drives are set up in RAID1 (mirror), and once a month, I plug in one of the spares, rsync the array to it, and unplug it. Every 3 months or so, I swap the offline drive with an offsite drive. I used to use a USB dock for the offline drive, but I got a 3-bay hot-swap enclosure to make the whole process faster and easier.
The server shares the array via NFS and SMB, and it is absolutely a NAS for all my other systems.
If you expect to exceed 2TB data within 2 years, then you'll need to replace all 4 of those 2TB drives in 2 years. You might, today, get a pair of 4 TB drives and one 2TB, use the 4TB as your main storage, the 2TBs as rotating backups, and wait until you actually outgrow 2TB to upgrade the backups.
that's a neat way of creating the backup! thanks :)
Others have answered most questions but I just wanted to point out a few things:
NAS is network attached storage: a separate server which makes 'shares'/volumes available over the local network. A DAS is 'direct attached storage' which plugs directly into a machine. Since you have a server, a NAS is probably the right route. https://www.techradar.com/features/das-vs-nas-what-is-the-difference
Good that you mentioned both backups and redundancy as they're not the same. https://www.tencentcloud.com/techpedia/108368
Some people want a dedicated machine for being a NAS, while others want to make use of the hardware by making it pull double-duty as a server. I have an old PC I loaded up with drives and installed truenas on: I made zfs pools (opposed to raid) and exposed shares to the network. I can set up virtual machines or use "plugins" / jails for hosting other services like immich etc. E.g. https://www.truenas.com/docs/solutions/integrations/nextcloud/
Regarding backup versioning, modern filesystems like zfs and brfs have snapshot features. Regarding "one backup", it depends how important it is to you. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
Since you have a server, a NAS is probably the right route.
I don't understand this. Imo, the previous sentence concludes that I want a DAS, not a NAS because I already have a server.
I'll look into zfs and btrfs. Somehow this topic is really difficult to grasp
A DAS is more like an external drive where as a NAS is a service reachable on your LAN. Of course, you could use a NAS and plug it straight into your PC for a more DAC-like experience to keep it off your network... It really depends on what you're after.
It ultimately breaks down to these choice dimensions, and there's often overlap which may inform one another (in no particular order):
- platform hardware
- storage medium(s) (ssd, hdd, layout, caches,....)
- filesystem(s)
- operating system
- shares protocol (Samba, NFS, WebDAV,....)
- topology (direct attach or where in your network it's located, vlans and firewalls etc.)
I interpreted 'server' to mean you had platform already which you want to turn into a NAS. If you want storage exclusively for your server, then DAS is fine. If you want to have the storage accessible my multiple devices, then you want a NAS.
It depends on your usecase and what features you're after.
Thank you! That sounds great! I already own drives and a machine. I just want to upgrade and make it more secure. I don't need a NAS then.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NFS | Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
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