Unfortunately, as Lemmy doesn’t appear to have an indexed search function I am not sure if this is a common question or not. Please point me to the necessary thread/s if this is answered elsewhere.

I’m looking to continue the ball rolling on my home server. Jellyfin setup was a nice dive back into networking, which I haven’t done for quite some time and the logical next step is to get all the data we want to retain into a single hub.

Most searches seem to point to syncthing with nextcloud, but before I get started, I want to check I am really going in the right direction.

I would like to primarily remove the space burden from my devices and dump them all onto a few drives and a cloud backup (in case of physical loss of drives). I believe syncthing can do this, but some appear to say that it is not an effective archive tool.

I would like to be able to retrieve this data without much hassle for e.g. photo editing, and place the finished file back on the server. Preferably the local copy would be removed again, to reduce the need for extra space on each device. I would like to run this over nextcloud, but might be misunderstanding the software a bit.

  • communism@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    18 days ago

    You’ve not made it clear what exactly it is you want. Nextcloud or syncthing are good for syncing personal files. If you want to make server backups, they’re not gonna be the way.

    If you want to automate backups, you could just use a cronjob to make a tarball and rsync it?

  • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
    3·
    19 days ago

    Remember sync isn’t a good backup. You’re thinking of loss of drives but if this is important data you need to also consider mistakes.

    If you accidentally delete files you shouldn’t, you don’t want this deletion to sync to all your copies so it’s gone for good and the backup doesn’t help.

    Personally I use borgmatic to keep incremental, deduplicated backups. Then I can go back to previous states.

    If you install nextcloud all in one, it comes with a backup solution (also borg based). Then devices don’t need a copy of every file. But you’ll want your server to have a backup drive for this.

    I then sync my borg backup to a backblaze b2 bucket for offsite, encrypted backup using rclone. That then meets the 3 2 1 backup plan.

    I notice you mention Jellyfin. I don’t back up my Jellyfin media, the cloud storage for that could get very expensive and I could get it again if I needed it.

    • merde alors@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      19 days ago

      If you accidentally delete files you shouldn’t, you don’t want this deletion to sync to all your copies so it’s gone for good and the backup doesn’t help.

      edit folder > ignore delete

      and you don’t have to worry about syncthing deleting your backup

      • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
        1·
        19 days ago

        Yip you can do that but then it’s messy! And what if you overwrite a file by accident?

        And if you do lose your hard drive then you have a weird state to restore from.

        I’d much prefer the ability to restore to a point in time that comes with something like borg.

        • merde alors@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          17 days ago

          And what if you overwrite a file by accident?

          you can activate one of the options in the “file versioning” to keep deleted files, up to x versions and however long you want

          And if you do lose your hard drive then you have a weird state to restore from.

          are you writing about losing the backUp drive?

          • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
            1·
            17 days ago

            I think versioning is the better option.

            are you writing about losing the backUp drive?

            No, losing your main version. Imagine you have a computer with syncthing and a server where it syncs to. If you chose no deletions, then it will sync all files to the server but all the stuff you deleted (draft documents, random files, photos from that time your kid held the camera button on your phone down and took 3000 photos in 30 seconds) will be deleted from your computer but still there on your server.

            When you computer gets struck by lightning and everything is destroyed but the server is fine, now you have to re-sort out all your files because all the stuff you deleted is still on the server version.

            Your suggestion of enabling the option to keep previous versions is probably cleaner. Personally I prefer to keep previous versions and deduplicate to save space.

      • aksdb@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        19 days ago

        That, on the other hand, is only viable, if you are sure, data never needs to expire. Dedicated backup solutions work with retention policies.

  • KaninchenSpeed@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    19 days ago

    I haven’t tried syncthing yet, but might be able to combine it with some of these ideas.

    I’m currently doing phone backups to a samba smb server with an app called smbsync2 from fdroid. It can copy or move files and directories from and to a smb share on a schedule. An option for desktop would be rsync.

    To get the archiving functionality you can do automatic ZFS snapshots. You can restore the entire snapshot or mount it via the terminal, or samba apparenly has a feature to display files from snapshots as shadow copies on windows.

    There is one limitation of this is, if a client deletes a file on the local storage, the file on the server doesn’t get deleted automaticly.

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    18 days ago

    3 copies of your data (original and 2 backups)

    2 different media. (pick 2: Raid, jbod, ssd, tape, managed cloud)

    1 off-site

    I’m gonna add in: one offline

    So

    original data on a mirror raid or raid 5

    External disc disconnected backup trued up whenever you can

    Syncthing/rsync/b2/S3 whatevs to get it off-site.

    The nice part about syncthing is it will stop if a certain percentage of you data changes. It has a good chance to stop ransomware as long as it’s not too slow at the encryption.

  • VeryFrugal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    18 days ago

    Exactly what are you trying to back up? If it’s for something like, let’s say, a password manager, syncing is the worst way imaginable.

    But if it’s for your Jellyfin media backup, rsync is pretty sufficient imo. They rarely change, costs pretty penny to back up and (relatively) easy to rebuild.

    So it all comes down to what your scenario is.