Since my file server adopted hardware RAID as part of its 2024 refit, and even the mdadm array that preceded it as part of the original 2023 design, one of my concerns has been the need for manual backups. It’s at least a process that’s been tested under fire during the Thinkpad to the face incident. But, I’m never been a great fan of manual for what should be automated.
The process remained largely the same, aside from the drive’s contents exceeding the capacity of one of my spare drives, leaving me with only one external drive sufficient for backing up. How often I actually managed to ensure both drives up to date aside, it’s generally been a bigger priority to take care of things that backup to the file server on a nightly basis.
Well, one of the upside of the transition from Rimuru to Ranga, is it’s effectively seen my Steam Deck decommissioned from /dev/tv to its storage case. As such, the external drive used for augmenting my deck’s internal drive and microSD card, became freshly available for repurposing. A drive that quite conveniently has the same storage capacity as my file server’s RAID array.
An upside of the Christmas break, I was able to find the time to setup the drive alongside the file server. It’s now a backup target, the entire RAID array being rsync’d daily via cron. My largest external SSD (only half the arrays size) remains an additional backup, and my frequency of go plug it in / run the backup script / unmount will still likely average a monthly or bimonthly ad-hoc affair.
The difference that makes me somewhat happier though? This solves one of the annoying problems: location. As an extra incentive, the external SSD has generally been kept nearby Zeta, so that it’s safe as the server. Since its smaller compadre graduated to being too small, no onsite backup has been stored in a separate location. Now that there’s a drive dedicated for daily backups of the array, my external gets promoted to ‘stored across the building’ status.
Because it’s always bugged me when the backups are right next to the machine being backed up. Like that never goes wrong? 😑. That’s exactly why a subset of the data deemed critical is deemed offsite required. But it’s still nice to have the full backup in a physically separate location, because ya never know when that is going to come in handy in a pinch. One of those days, it’ll probably get upgraded to being the offsite backup.
Ahh, here’s hoping I don’t end up buying hard drives next year….