Hi everyone,
I’m visiting some family in another area of the country soon, and have the opportunity to set up a little remote backup server.
Essentially I would like to set something up that I can ssh into and backup photos/videos/documents from my main server periodically once a month or so. Ideally it would be off until I need to turn it on.
I’m looking for ideas on how to best approach this. What kind of hardware would you use in my shoes? I have a couple of spare raspberry pi’s I was thinking to use with an external drive. I was also considering something like those ugreen nas devices that have been popping up. I would ideally set it up and do a sync before I head there, and then just plug it in. Would wake on lan be advised for this?
In theory that is solvable by a PiKVM,JetKVM,nankKVM, etc.
It won’t help if your power supply breaks and KVM itself can malfunction too. It’s of course nice to have, but it has limitations.
We are talking about a hobbyist here - if you want to have precautions against all these points OP would need to have a redundant PSU, redundant power sources with automatic failover, backup power,etc. Of course paired with redundant data connections, redundant KVM solutions, physical access management, etc.
In other words: A freaking data center.
Sure, PSUs break. Happens. But very very rarely. And everything else that is on the side of his backup device can be handled through a KVM. And tbh, if that one fails, one can usually direct a “non IT user” to simply pull the plug and put it back on.
Obviously we’re talking about hobbyist level stuff and with that there’s always something what can go wrong and it’s not always obvious what it is. So if the ‘remote end’ doesn’t have someone who can do at least very basic troubleshooting it can be nearly impossible to fix the setup over the phone unless you just replace the whole thing and ship whole units back and forth.
But in this particular case the remote end has someone who knows their stuff so it’s taken care of, with or without a KVM. I’ve been thinking a similar setup with my relatives and on my case the distance isn’t an issue but it’s still something I’d need to bother family members with and, for me, it was simpler to get a storage box from hetzner and run backups to that instead of getting more hardware.
Maintenance is anyways something you need to consider and viable options for that vary on a case-by-case basis, so there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution.