Recently I upgraded my server (14600K, 64GB, ZFS mirror 2x1TB NVMe and 2x8TB HDD) and I want to improve also the backup. Right now I have a 10TB external HDD that syncs the 8TB HDD ZFS pool manually (so basically just DR). I want to improve this to automate the backup with an off-site system. I have the following parts:
WD 10TB external HDD
mATX motherboard and i5 6400
4x2TB Samsung 870 Evo
1x4TB and 3x2TB HDDs
Possibilities (selling the parts not used):
Buy a mini PC and use the external HDD
Buy something like a Jonsbo N4 and use the mATX build with HDDs (RAIDZ1 6TB pool)
Put the SSDs in the server to lower power consumption and one of the above (Does 4x2TB SSDs consume significant less power than 2x8TB HDDs?)
If you want to start cheap you could plug the 10TB drive into an RPi and put it at a friends house. Use sanoid and syncoid to auto-snapshot and auto-sync your servers data to the zpool on the RPi.
If you want something a bit more professional and only for offsite backups there are services such as zfs.rent that you can ship a SATA drive to and they will connect it to a small VPS that you can sync your ZFS snapshots to.
As long as you are doing regular ZFS scrubs you probably don’t need redundancy in your offsite backups, depending on how critical your data is.
I will put it in my parent’s house. The Pi will put the cost the same as reusing the i5 6400. Does a Pi 4 have enough power to do things timely and does ZFS and that programs you say support for ARM?
Services are not an option because costs add up and in less than a year the hardware pays for itself. Also I plan to power on the server only when doing the backup, so electricity cost is not an issue.
Data is a mix of important and not important data. ZFS scrubs are done weekly.
I don’t think the cost and effort of switching to a new system is worth it for your use case.
Figure out how to reliably start and stop the remote PC, connect securely, and be done.
Ok, then just put the i5 system at your parents and connect the 10TB usb drive to it and configure the ZFS sync software. I don’t know how you’re going to get your backup system to turn itself on and off reliably though. I’d rather spend the $2-$3/month to have my system running 24/7 then having my disk constantly spinning up and down. I do hourly snapshots and syncs so having my offsite server turn off is not an option.
Some motherboards can be configured to power on at a defined time. Others can when they receive power, which I can program with a smart plug. The option to use WoL is always there.
Keep in mind that electricity is costly in most countries and I am not US based
Pretty much all of my systems (even laptops) have a 2nd drive(s), be it nvme or spinners. They’re all root-on-zfs. The home dataset snapshots and syncs to the 2nd drive every 15mins, the other datasets (if any) snap/sync hourly and the root also snaps before any apt upgrade or apt install.
The backup box with a bunch of old drives in several pools is powered up via wakeonlan every 3am, and then all systems sync to their backup datasets.
This provides enough granular snaps locally, with at most a day of loss in the event that a box catches fire or otherwise destroys both the main and backup drive.
zfs-autosnapshot and zfs-backup work well, and I also have zrepl in place, migrating to that in general.
