I personally use Tilda… because it allows me to drop it down using just the ` key, and the background transparency actually works (unlike Yakuake) on my distro.
Backing up to a local server and then shunting off to B2 is largely what I do, except I just use a local file share and try not to store much locally. The Windows 10 built in backup works quite well for this. The file share I back up using Duplicati.
I have not used Duplicati at all, so grain of salt. Every time I see it mentioned someone comes along and shares horrible experiences with corrupted backups leaving them unable to restore. Which has made me extremely leery of it. I’ll have to research more on that and see whats what.
I did have a problem with this, but it was due to a password manager (possibly Chrome’s built-in one which I had a load of passwords duplicated in at one point) auto-filling a hidden field with the wrong password.
The front-end error is backup corrupt, but it’s not, it’s just the encryption key has been changed at the point of restore. Sort that and error gone.
This might be controversial here. But if reliability is your biggest concern, you really can’t go wrong with:
A proper hardware RAID controller
You want something with patrol read, supercapacitor- or battery-backed cache/NVRAM, and a fast enough chipset/memory to keep up with the underlying drives.
LVM with snapshots
Ext4 or XFS
A basic UPS that you can monitor with NUT to safely shut down your system during an outage.
I would probably stick with ext4 for boot and XFS for data. They are both super reliable, and both are usually close to tied for general-purpose performance on modern kernels.
That’s what we do in enterprise land. Keep it simple. Use discrete hardware/software components that do one thing and do it well.
I had decade-old servers with similar setups that were installed with Ubuntu 8.04 and upgraded all the way through 18.04 with minimal issues (the GRUB2 migration being one of the bigger pains). Granted, they went through plenty of hard drives. But some even got increased capacity along the way (you just replace them one at a time and let the RAID resilver in-between).
Edit to add: The only gotcha you really have to worry about is properly aligning the filesystem to the underlying RAID geometry (if the RAID controller doesn’t expose it to the OS for you). But that’s more important with striping.
How many hardware RAID controllers have you had fail? I have had zero of 800 fail. And even if one did, the RAID metadata is stored on the last block of each drive. Pop in new card, select import, done.
I am sorry that you had to personally experience data loss from one specific hardware failure. I will amend the post to indicate that a proper hardware RAID controller should use the SNIA Common RAID DDF. Even mdadm can read it in the event of a controller failure.
Any mid- to high-tier MegaRAID card should support it. I have successfully pulled disks directly from a PERC 5 and imported them to a PERC 8 without issues due to the standardized format.
ZFS is great too if you have the knowledge and know-how to maintain it properly. It’s extremely flexible and extremely powerful. But like most technologies, it comes with its own set of tradeoffs. It isn’t the most performant out-of-the-box, and it has a lot of knobs to turn. And no filesystem, regardless of how resilient it is, will ever be as resilient to power failures as a battery/supercapacitor-backed path to NVRAM.
To put it simply, ZFS is sufficiently complex to be much more prone to operator error.
For someone with the limited background knowledge that the OP seems to have on filesystem choices, it definitely wouldn’t be the easiest or fastest choice for putting together a reliable and performant system.
If it works for you personally, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Or if you want to trade anecdotes, the only volume I’ve ever lost was on a TrueNAS appliance after power failure, and even iXsystems paid support was unable to assist. Ended up having to rebuild and copy from an off-site snapshot.
I like how the +1 of OG Reddit made it to Lemmy, but without the downvote hate of current Reddit. I’ve always seen those comments as more than just an upvote. An upvote can be a “+1”, but also a “thank you for your contribution”. A +1 is only a +1.
Install ncdu, then sudo ncdu -x /var it’ll tell you what is taking up space, then if you tell us, we can help you identify how to minimize it and keep it low.
It’s not Windows, it’s either a firmware or hardware issue. Windows installs very quickly actually, nowadays, but of course it’s full of ad tracking etc.
Remove the graphics card and any other extras. Just start with the motherboard, power supply, RAM and hard drive. Try install it. It should work. If not, it may be a motherboard issue. You may have to boot into the bios and see if the firmware can be updated, check secure boot, UEFI etc.
Reset the bios to factory and try again.
Once windows is installed. Install the graphics card driver, then shut it down, install the card, move the HDMI over to the card and boot. It should work.
Doesn’t mean it’s not a hardware issue, just means they aren’t running into it in their Arch install. But honestly this is probably just a bunch of bull.
CLI is the best way… it’s not difficult, borg is really easy to use, what are you hung up on? I can probably help if you have questions on it.
I don’t use Windows, but you could syncthing important files to your server, then use borg to make legit backups of all the important files on your server. I store all my important files on one of my servers. Basically, all my PCs act more like thin clients… as far as files go anyway. I also backup my entire phone in a similar way as I’m suggesting you for Windows using syncthing for all my photos/videos/documents/etc.
If you want, you can read this which describes my entire backup solution.
I like borg because once you figure out what directories you want to backup, then you just put them in a script and schedule to run however often you like it. I also set healthchecks to notify me if it does not run… and for even further peace of mind, I have the output from the script sent to my Telegram just in case there were any errors.
Here is an example of my config with some changes made to post publicly. This is backing up all the important files from my main server to two other servers. You could also do the same to a local location and/or a remote location like borgbase or backblaze. This server has all the important files for everything, so this one script backs up all my docker services on this server, all my phone backups, all my desktop/laptop backups, and all my music/tv/movies. Literally everything except the docker services running on the other servers.
<span style="color:#323232;">#!/bin/bash
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#get date
</span><span style="color:#323232;">NOW=$(date +"%y.%m")
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#notify healthchecks script ran
</span><span style="color:#323232;">curl http://thinkcentre.lan:7055/ping/W0WfGWIWDUDP5blEV00pOw/thinkbox-backup-script
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#setup env
</span><span style="color:#323232;">export BORG_RSH="ssh -i ~/somedir/thekey"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">export BORG_PASSPHRASE="password"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">export BORG_RELOCATED_REPO_ACCESS_IS_OK=yes
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#stop all docker containers
</span><span style="color:#323232;">docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#run nas backup to 5tb drive (connected to rockpro64 running dietpi)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/mnt/storage/borg::tv.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-70d630c3-5019-446a-ab57-ef796cfdab76/media/tv/completed.shows /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-70d630c3-5019-446a-ab57-ef796cfdab76/media/tv/misc
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/mnt/storage/borg::common.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-3a8447fe-a660-4ac7-ae46-2de19b6d59c1/
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/mnt/storage/borg::music.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-70d630c3-5019-446a-ab57-ef796cfdab76/media/music
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/mnt/storage/borg::public.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/public --exclude '/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/public/downloads/*' --exclude '/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/public/temp'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/mnt/storage/borg::backups.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/backups
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/mnt/storage/borg::thinkb.home.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/home
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/mnt/storage/borg::thinkb.docker.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/docker
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#run nas backup to 2tb drive (connected to thinkc)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#this one excludes backups/.archive/borg for space
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/shared/storage/borg::tv.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-70d630c3-5019-446a-ab57-ef796cfdab76/media/tv/completed.shows /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-70d630c3-5019-446a-ab57-ef796cfdab76/media/tv/misc
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/shared/storage/borg::common.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-3a8447fe-a660-4ac7-ae46-2de19b6d59c1/
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/shared/storage/borg::music.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-70d630c3-5019-446a-ab57-ef796cfdab76/media/music
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/shared/storage/borg::public.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/public --exclude '/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/public/downloads/*' --exclude '/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/public/temp'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/shared/storage/borg::backups.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/backups --exclude '/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/backups/user/.archive/borg/*'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/shared/storage/borg::thinkb.home.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/home
</span><span style="color:#323232;">borg create --stats [email protected]:/shared/storage/borg::thinkb.docker.$NOW /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-b5cb9459-0144-494b-af8c-89db1f742a83/docker
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#these services need to start before other services that depend on them
</span><span style="color:#323232;">docker start redis
</span><span style="color:#323232;">docker start nginx
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#start all the other services
</span><span style="color:#323232;">docker start $(docker ps -a -q)
</span>
That’s the rub. I keep seeing that it’s easy and the best way and folks fawn over Restic and Borg (for seemingly good reasons) so I start to read the documentation on setting it up and my eyes glaze over and I’m lost because there are assumptions made regarding the readers knowledge beforehand. Which is fair in this context. Even you example, which thank you by the way, assumes I know scripting. Yeah…not so much. I will look into what you’ve written and linked though. Maybe it’ll click for me. I also looked at some of the wrappers for both Borg (borgmatic) and Restic (autorestic) and it’s still over my head. I get the general concept that instead of writing it all down, you’re creating configs ahead of time, similar to your script example. But I’m not at a spot where I can dive into that sort of thing yet. I need a ELI5, for CLI stuff I guess…
You can get by with a GUI wrapper for borg, that is another option. I know OpenMediaVault even has it built in to the WebGUI, but I know you are using UnRaid so you’d have to see if they have anything. Otherwise you could maybe find a docker container for Vorta or something to spin up.
But on a server platform it will greatly benefit you to learn to use a terminal because pretty much all the best and most efficient tooling is going to use it. You may possibly see yourself running into this problem over and over where you want a GUI to do something when GUI tooling on the server platform just doesn’t quite exist or isn’t as efficient or reliable for many different reasons.
I would say just take small steps, don’t try to take it all in at once. When you have free time, sit down with it, and just be patient and try to understand what you can, and if you get frustrated just put it down and walk away. It’s not a race and you can always go back later. Also, trial and error in small tests with data that won’t matter. That goes for any terminal based tooling. And every new tool you learn, it will get easier and easier.
And like I said before, if you do have questions feel free to hit me up. I started a selfhosting series on YouTube and have a few videos up, but I will actually be redoing it and trying to make it even more beginner friendly. Talking to someone that doesn’t have much experience with a terminal may be beneficial to knowing what needs to be addressed in them.
All valid points and I appreciate the input. My frustration comes from a lot of the tutorials online for these types of tools already start ahead of my knowledge. I have some terminal knowledge and have been messing around on. VPS I rent just so that if things go really bad, I’m not hosing my production server. And that’s been ok. I’ve even stood up an instance of Miniflux and Wallabag for my Read It Later stack and it’s working really well. I absolutely do need to learn more about using terminal though. I’ve always had good success learning by doing, with a project in mind rather than reading courses only and using their course materials for the actual practice portions. And example would be using digital footage of my own kids to learn video editing instead of the sample clips that came with the book/online class.
I’ll take you up on the offer for help. I will try again and when I get stuck I’ll shout. I appreciate your input!
Id go with your distro default which I think is ext4 for most distros and do proper backups/data management (which might include a Nas running zfs–so you get the best of both worlds).
Depending on your data it might be small and not need a Nas necessarily. Things like code could go up on GitHub or gitlab. Games themselves can always be redownloaded etc. If your data is small enough, cloud storage isn’t too pricey.
One of the best things you can do for a PC is getting a solid true sine wave battery backup that will let you weather electricity fluctuations, surges, brownouts ,and give you time to shut down properly during an outage.
Distro defaults are chosen for general purpose use and stability. For op’s specific requirement, zfs, xfs, and btrfs are all definitely better. For the boot drive, I can understand going for the default since you just want it to be stable, but having some snapshotting and fault protection isn’t a bad thing.
There’s a way to figure out what is responsible for using up all of that space. A couple of ways, really. Here’s the one I use, though: du -s -h -x /path/to/ | sort -h -r | head -n 10*
du
-s - display only a total for each argument
-h - human readable values
-x - do not cross file systems (in case you have another directory tree mounted under /var, which’ll complicate figuring out what’s in there for this purpose)
sort
-h - compare human readable numbers (e.g., 1G, 2T)
Not sure if that’s a good idea but if you use Fedora, you also have your root on a BTRFS partition after a default installation. You could utilize the snapshot features of BTRFS to roll back after testing.
I need to explore this BTRFS feature, I just don’t have a good place or reason to start Dow that path yet. I’ve been on Silverblue for years, but decided to try Workstation for now. Someone in the past told me I should have been using BTRFS for FreeCAD saves, but I never got around to trying it.
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.