this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
33 points (86.7% liked)

Selfhosted

40246 readers
763 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hey guys ive been self hosting things for a while now mostly just off a bunch if old computers in a k8s cluster.

The majour issue i have currently is all my data is on a single hdd in an old dektop. Its painfully slow and very risky as i have no backup or anything (i dont feel to great about that).

I really dont have much $ to spend hence my setup is built from a stack of practically ewaste hobbled together. I finally have the $ to buy some drives how should i go about building myself a nas on the cheap?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

There's nothing wrong with a single HDD in an old desktop except for the risk of failure.

I would start by getting one hdd that's the same size or larger than the one you have and using it as backup. If the old HDD is very old and small you can probably find a larger one cheap, don't go out of your way to find another small and old one.

Something like Borg Backup will be perfect if you use a Linux filesystem because Borg is incremental, has deduplication and compression built-in. There is a very simple graphical app for it called Pika Backup (for Linux).

There are other solutions if you use Windows but even a simple copy of your important files is better than nothing. Get a HDD and copy files to it right away.

Another backup solution is to buy a DVD or BluRay burner (can be USB or internal) and backup super important files to optical disks. This may or may not be cheaper than a HDD.

Do NOT rush into RAID, Unraid, TrueNAS and other fancy stuff like that. Your priority right now should be backup not RAID. RAID is a convenience for keeping a system running when a HDD fails but it is NOT a replacement for a good incremental backup.

After you have a backup in place and use it regularly you can consider whether RAID and availability is something you want/need.