Turn your old, cracked Android phone into a backup server

Re:Turn your old, cracked Android phone into a backup server by neartheplain on Monday June 21, 2021 @05:10AM (#27577506)

To me, a real NAS box means:

- ECC RAM, to avoid corruption on write

- Software RAID, to avoid data loss due to drive failure

- Some kind of checksumming and error-correcting filesystem, e.g. ZFS, to prevent data loss due to bad sectors

- Enough CPU to transcode media in real-time

- Vanilla distro with SSH, SMB filesharing, Plex, and networked printing

- A spare PSU in the closet

I explicitly avoid:

- Hardware RAID (unnecessary, expensive, harder to fix)

- Any OEM prebuilt NAS products (more expensive, less capable, less user control)

- Any specialty NAS-oriented distros or OSes (more feature bloat, bigger attack surfaces)

I use plain old Debian for my home NAS. I'd switch to OpenBSD in a heartbeat if it supported a checksumming and error-correcting filesystem.

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Re:Turn your old, cracked Android phone into a backup server by nottorp on Monday June 21, 2021 @06:12AM (#27577789)

> Software RAID, to avoid data loss due to drive failure

Ok it's old but: raid is not backup.

I've personally worked for a small online shop that was selling digital items and shut down when their raid failed. Of course, they had ignored my warnings to build a mirror system or do copies on removable drives or ... anything resembling an actual backup.

Edit: that said, I do have a box that's pretty similar to what you're describing.

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Re:Turn your old, cracked Android phone into a backup server by neartheplain on Monday June 21, 2021 @06:50AM (#27577968)

Yes, for actual backups I have M-DISC BluRays [0] which I keep in a fireproof box. They're limited in capacity compared to the full NAS, but big enough for really important stuff like photos and scanned documents (which conveniently are intrinsically write-once).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

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Re:Turn your old, cracked Android phone into a backup server by khimaros on Monday June 21, 2021 @08:17AM (#27578417)

encrypted, deduplicated offsite backups are another approach. borgbackup on free tier cloud services can be useful for this.

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Re:Turn your old, cracked Android phone into a backup server by syntheticnature on Monday June 21, 2021 @09:10AM (#27578775)

Serious question: are there free tier cloud services with enough storage to be worthwhile?

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Re:Turn your old, cracked Android phone into a backup server by justin_oaks on Monday June 21, 2021 @11:20AM (#27580035)

It probably depends on how much you need to store. But if you need ongoing backup that will get larger and larger then the answer is probably "No".

I back up my family photos and other important files to Amazon S3 using Restic. My 150GB of data ends up costing me about $1.50/month. I could get the price down lower if I use, say, the Infrequent Access storage tier, but at that price point I just can't be bothered to deal with it.

A free tier often isn't worth it if you have to put any time into thinking about whether you'll exceed the limit. I'd just go with a cheap pay-as-you-go service and not worry about it.

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Re:Turn your old, cracked Android phone into a backup server by Miraste on Monday June 21, 2021 @10:53AM (#27579748)

> Any specialty NAS-oriented distros or OSes (more feature bloat, bigger attack surfaces)

So you recommend ZFS but not TrueNAS? It more or less is FreeBSD with zfs and NAS-oriented defaults+utils. There's not much I'd count as bloat.

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