this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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[Help] Improving HDD storage setup for personal server (lemmy.zip)
submitted 6 months ago by selfmate@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I want a server running nextcloud, immich and others.

I have a N100 mini server with a 2TB external HDD. I want to secure the system against data loss. Hence, I want a backup and redundancy.

  1. Most important question: How do I build everything? Is this a NAS? My naive approach is to buy 3 external HDDs and connect them to the N100 with a USB hub. I assume this is not "the right way" but to use/build a NAS. Do I have to build a separate NAS computer? When I lookup NAS buying, it is a computer with a case for 4 drives, excluding the drives and costs 400 bucks. I am confused because this is incredibly expensive compared to what I already have. What is the additional benefit compared to my setup? Am I cheap?

  2. Regarding redundancy, is RAID still the way to go? At 2 TB, using RAID 5 with 3 drives sounds good. I'd have 4 TB of usable space, much more than I intend to use in the next years, and adding a drive increases the storage by 2 TB, effectively increasing space by 50%.

  3. I have 4 TB usable space, but I won't reach 2 TB in the next one or two years. I'd use a 2 TB HDD for a local backup via borg. Once my hot storage needs to increase, I replace the backup drive with a larger one and use it to increase the RAID storage. Is one backup sufficient? Or should I keeping multiple versions of the data. Daily, weekly, monthly backups? What is your experience with it?

  4. Another 2 TB HDD for an offsite backup, LUKS encrypted, backed up once a year (that's the goal for now).

Does that sound good?

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[โ€“] selfmate@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

all good. thanks for exchanging our experience :)

kopia wasn't running durin the week. I didn't look into the server configuration since it introduces user handling and that seemed to be overkill for the task but running as daemon would lead to a funcitoning system of course.

this is my kopia.service file in case some else finds it and is interested in it

[Unit]

Description=kopia backup

[Service]

User=root ExecStart=$HOME/bin/backup_kopia

[Install]

WantedBy=multi-user.target

where $HOME/bin/backup_kopia contains

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/kopia repository connect filesystem --path $KOPIA_REPO --password $KOPIA_PASSWORD

/usr/bin/kopia snapshot create $HOME/folder_to_backup

and my kopia.timer

[Unit]

Description=Run kopia backup

[Timer]

OnCalendar=hourly

Persistent=true

[Install]

WantedBy=timers.target

[โ€“] selfmate@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 months ago

the backup is working