I recently replaced an ancient laptop with a slightly less ancient one.
- host for backups for three other machines
- serve files I don’t necessarily need on the new machine
- relatively lightweight - “server” is ~15 years old
- relatively simple - I’d rather not manage a dozen docker containers.
- internal-facing
- does NOT need to handle Android and friends. I can use sync-thing for that if I need to.
Left to my own devices I’d probably rsync for 90% of that, but I’d like to try something a little more pointy-clicky or at least transparent in my dotage.
Edit: Not SAMBA (I freaking hate trying to make that work)
Edit2: for the young’uns: NFS (linux “network filesystem”)
Edit 3: LAN only. I may set up a VPN connection one day but it’s not currently a priority. (edited post to reflect questions)
Last Edit: thanks, friends, for this discussion! I think based on this I’ll at least start with NFS + my existing backups system (Mint’s thing, which is I think just a gui in front of rcync). May play w/ modern SAMBA if I have extra time.
Ill continue to read the replies though - some interesting ideas.
For smaller folders I like using syncthing, that way it’s like having multiple updated backups
Syncthing is neat, but you shouldn’t consider it to be a backup solution. If you accidentally delete or modify a file on one machine, it’ll happily propagate that change to all other machines.
You can turn off “delete”, but modification is a danger, it’s true.
Turning off delete makes it excellent for eg. backing up photographs on your phone. I’ve got it doing this from my Android to my raspberry pi, which puts them on my NAS for me. Saves losing all my pictures if I lose my phone.
I like this solution because I can have the need filled without a central server. I use old-fashioned offline backups for my low-churn, bulk data, and SyncThing for everything else to be eventually consistent everywhere.
If my data was big enough so as to require dedicated storage though, I’d probably go with TrueNAS.