this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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linuxmemes

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I use Arch btw


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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I know that making networks out of duct tape and bubblegum is a point of pride in the Linux community, but if you have to store vital data, wouldn't a nice hardware NAS and a RAID array be a better solution?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

How about an external HDD plugged into the Pi? Even a usb stick is better than writing it to the microsd card.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My brain didn't even register that the meme was about NAS data residing on the SD card. I automatically assumed it's on attached disks and was about to snark-reply about keeping a cloned SD card taped to the Pi case for such occasions.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Either go big or go home. RAID or bust.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Remote mount datacenter storage pools or go home. If you have physical room for your disks in your house, you need to go bigger.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Funny. My WD nas runs linux and the support ended so i've had to upgrade myself with entware... and it's old, so the fan was sized for cooler hard drives, so I cut a hole in the top and screwed on another fan... and WD removed NFS support years ago, so I just mount my shares oversshfs... and i'm currently upping my local security so it's only accessible over wireguard... honestly, I have no idea what it's doing with the hardware raid and the way it mounts drives so i'm tempted to switch over to mergerfs and snapraid...

Basically my legit consumer hardware raid nas is more duct tape and bubblegum than my home built linux nas. Then again, it's easily a decade past its anticipated useful life too.

I guess it is a point of pride.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Backups people backups. You don't realize how much you want them until it's too late to make them.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

don't worry I have raid, that's a backup right?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Raid 0 right? I heard the number stands for how much risk there is of losing data.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Add more disks for more reliability

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Due to the green economy I only buy second or third hand disks for my RAID0 setup

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

No, the backup goes after the raid when something goes wrong.

Wait, I thought you're talking about that SWAT team outside your house.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If 3-2-1 is a good backup strategy, RAID (non-zero) is like 0.5 at best. Maybe 0.6 if your config can handle 2 simultaneous drive failures

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

How do I make a backup of my pi and all its settings? I set everything up following guides and am not great with Linux. Is there a way to make like a full clone, so I can just copy paste into a new pi in case?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I think the same software you used to image your SD card can be used to make an image from your SD card.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Copy the entire SD card (both partitions) with a tool like dd to a file.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also remember to backup before things break. I once diligently backed up a system image before an upgrade. But I backed up a already failed SD card.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and if possible, keep some backups in a separate physical location. House fires or break-ins aren't all that uncommon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

A good advice, but most regular people don't seem to bother with rotating physical off-site storage mediums so I advocate automated (and encrypted) backups to a cloud or something as well.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

If you must use an SD card: use log2ram. Greatly reduces the number of IO operations to the card and prolongs its life.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

LPT: pies since at least the 3b can boot from USB.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I’ve never relayed to a meme more. I moved my UPS to my work computer after that one failed and three days later, I lost power. Spent five hours fixing a corrupted SD card then reconfiguring my Pi-Hole and HomeBridge.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (7 children)
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not quite the same, but I made the mistake of using my RPi to run my home server and NAS off of an external USB non-NAS (i.e., not intended to be running 24/7) drive...with no backup or redundancy. The drive actually lasted a good long while, but it did die, and very suddenly, a couple of months ago. And now I've lost all my stuff that was on it. Still holding out hope I can figure out a way to recover the drive, but yeah.

Back up your shit, yo.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Is it an HDD? Those are quite easy to recover, just put the disk into a working HDD

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This has happened several times to my Pi-Hole. Even with backups, trying to get my network back online still takes too long. I haven't found a good solution for resilience yet.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly something that critical probably shouldn't run on a rpi. There are plenty of cheap used thin clients you can buy on eBay that have better performance and reliability. I probably like the thinkcentre micros, but feel and hp have good options too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Pis can be supremely reliable when used correctly for the purpose. E.g. use high quality SD cards and don't write to them much, or a good quality SSD if you have to do significant writes, use an official or better PSU, etc. My oldest 4 is from 2019 and it's been in continuous use since then. It used to be a NAS running a 2-disk mirror exported over NFS. These days it's a gigabit OpenWrt router with SQM. It's still in the original SD card.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Try to use overlayfs under raspi-config, I've been running some raspberry pis for years with that (mostly on offsite locations where fixing dead sd cards is not possible)

Updating the pis is a little more work but in some use cases it's worth it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think something like BTRFS might be a better solution as overlayfs seems to freeze the system image state. Something which is copy on write (COW) seems like it would be more resilient and still provide an RW file system. To do it right would probably be a combination of the two with the data partition BTRFS and the system image partition overlayfs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah that sounds like a good solution. I think arch based pikvm does something similar. (no reboot necessary to enable rw)

For those pis that need to write stuff, I usually mount a network drive and use that while having the overlayfs enabled. So far haven't had any issues, only one pi died after 3 years due to faulty power supply.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I use an old netbook as Pi-hole. It has a battery so powerouts are not a problem.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Full redundant JBOD backup. It's unfancy and safe.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Pfft, mine boots from a USB SSD, and since my services are all containerized I just gzip the directory with all my docker-compose files and volumes and chuck it into B2 every 6 hours

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

https://raspibackup.linux-tips-and-tricks.de/en/home/

Regular unattended backups in seconds using hardlinks. Honestly, it doesn’t get any better.

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