My goal is to create an simple offsite backup of my CasaOS setup using a RasPi 3b+ with external USB drive at a friend's house. Are there any recommended methods for doing this?

Also: what should I look for in an external hard drive as far as reliability goes for something that will essentially always be on? I'm not well versed in all the WD blue, red, etc. Does it matter?

  • Dran@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Flash drives are notorious for spontaneous and ungraceful failures. At the very minimum, you want a proper Hard Drive or SSD. Generally, any reputable brand marketing a "NAS" drive is probably what you want. Nothing spectacularly fast, but designed for a lot of power on hours.

    • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
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      1 year ago

      One important thing with SSDs is that many even today aren't great with power loss detection.

      Kingston makes a very reasonably priced data center class SSD with lots of RW cycles and specific power loss protection. I haven't tested them yet, but it's a good sign they at least mention it in their specs. I previously used intel data center class SSDs, but they're harder to get ahold of these days.

  • SlothCroissant@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    IMO, a Pi running off a MicroSD card is by far the highest failure risk you have in this configuration. Most modern spinning disks are more than capable of being a backup workhorse, while MicroSD cards feel like a crapshoot.

    For backups, I’m a fan of pretty much anything new from Seagate or WD (failure rates are minimally different), though you can also check Backblaze’s quarterly reports if you want to get specific.

    My other go-to is just used enterprise HDDs (usually SAS for my configuration, but SATA is there too) since such drives often come with very low write life used, and generally incorporate features that make for an extremely high MTBF. Though it’s obviously hit or miss if you get a drive that was barely used or a drive that was beaten to death. Good eBay sellers usually are pretty good about these things though.

    In either case, you’ll need an enclosure (obviously if buying new, you can just buy one with the enclosure).

    • Corgana@startrek.websiteOP
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      1 year ago

      IMO, a Pi running off a MicroSD card is by far the highest failure risk you have in this configuration.

      Yeaaah I know but it's all I've got right now. I plan on keeping a backup image of the microSD image in case it breaks I can just swap it out.

      Thanks for the advice! Do you think SyncThing would be the most straightforward way of doing it? I'm running CasaOS for most apps but have HA in a virtual machine.

      • Shady_Shiroe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Try one of those endurance micro SD cards, since you dont need a lot of storage for OS they should be pretty cheap like 32gb is like $12.

        • Corgana@startrek.websiteOP
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          1 year ago

          endurance micro SD card

          Great to know about, thanks. SanDisk has 64gb for $10 on Amazon (32gb for $12 lol)

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        May be worth doing backups with something like rsnapshot. That way you'll have history in the event of any data corruption.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      +1, all of my SBCs that do important things have the OS installed on an SSD plugged into a USB3 enclosure and (if needed) only the bootloader and /boot on an SD card. That cuts wear on the SD down to almost nothing. Pick up a good condition msata or m.2 2230/2242 drive on eBay and stick it in an enclosure and watch SMART stats and you shouldn't have any unexpected failures.

  • rambos@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Look for proper exrernal HDD/SSD case with its own PSU. You can find some info about compatibility with rpi.

    Keep in mind that SATA to USB A adaptors exist and they work (with SSD at least), but its best to avoid them imo. Ive been using SSD on Rpi4 like that, it was working fine, but after corruption happened I found out it couldnt complete SMART test every time (another SSD didnt have that problem).

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzB
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    1 year ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    HA Home Assistant automation software
    ~ High Availability
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    PSU Power Supply Unit
    RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
    SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
    SBC Single-Board Computer
    SSD Solid State Drive mass storage

    6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

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