I have a server running Debian with 24 TB of storage. I would ideally like to back up all of it, though much of it is torrents, so only the ones with low seeders really need backed up. I know about the 321 rule but it sounds like it would be expensive. What do you do for backups? Also if anyone uses tape drives for backups I am kinda curious about that potentially for offsite backups in a safe deposit box or something.
TLDR: title.
Edit: You have mentioned borg and rsync, and while borg looks good, I want to go with rsync as it seems to be more actively maintained. I would like to also have my backups encrypted, but rsync doesn’t seem to have that built in. Does anyone know what to do for encrypted backups?
I don’t have nearly that much worth backing up(5TB–and realistically only 2TB is probably critical), but I have a Synology Nas(12TB raid 1) and truenas (zfs striped/mirrored) that I back my stuff to (and they back up to each other).
Then I have a raspberry pi with a USB drive (8tb) at my parents house 4 hours away, that my Synology backs up to (over tailscale).
Oh, and I have a USB HDD(8tb) that I plug in and backup my Synology Nas to and throw in my fireproof safe. But thats a manual backup I do once every quarter or 6 months if I remember. That’s a very very last resort backup.
My offsite is at my parents.
And no, I have not tested it because I don’t know how I’m actually supposed to do that.
I have to say that I was really surprised that apparently there isn’t a general solution for gluing together different-sized drives in an array reasonably-efficiently other than Synology’s Hybrid RAID. I mean, you can build something that works similarly on a Linux machine, but there apparently isn’t an out-of-the-box software package that does that. It seems like the kind of thing that’d be useful, but…shrugs
I think unRAID does that. But I never looked into it much tbh.
Both UnraidFS and mergerFS can merge drives of separate types and sizes into one array. They also allow removing / adding drives without disturbing the array. None of this is possible with traditional RAID (or at least not without a significant time sink for re-making the array), no matter the type of RAID you use.
depends on what you backup and how.
if it’s just “dumb” files (videos, music pictures etc.), just retrieve them from your backups and check if you can open the files.
complex stuff? probably try to rebuild the complex stuff from a backup and check if it works as expected and is in the state you expect it to be in. how to do that really depends on the complex stuff.
i’d guess for most people it’s enough to make sure to backup dumb files and configurations, so they can rebuild their stuff rather than being able to restore a complex system in exactly the same state it was in before bad things happened.