this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
51 points (98.1% liked)

Selfhosted

49699 readers
757 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi everyone,

I’m visiting some family in another area of the country soon, and have the opportunity to set up a little remote backup server.

Essentially I would like to set something up that I can ssh into and backup photos/videos/documents from my main server periodically once a month or so. Ideally it would be off until I need to turn it on.

I’m looking for ideas on how to best approach this. What kind of hardware would you use in my shoes? I have a couple of spare raspberry pi’s I was thinking to use with an external drive. I was also considering something like those ugreen nas devices that have been popping up. I would ideally set it up and do a sync before I head there, and then just plug it in. Would wake on lan be advised for this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tuhriel@infosec.pub 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I have a remote backup setup at my parents, which consists of a rpi4 and an external hdd (old NAS HDD). The rpi also has a wireguard interface running. If I need to back stuff up (via a restic-rest container) I open the vpn from my side, start the container, mount/decrypt the hdd and trigger the restic update. Afterwards everything gets disconnected again.

The rpi needs to be always on and you need to be able to forward a port to the rpi.

The data should be secure though, as the disk is encrypted and not mounted. (You can even store the decryption key on your side of the network, so you need the vpn to be able to mount the hdd)

[–] rehydrate5503@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think this is the play. I’ll likely just get an enclosure for the two 4TB drives I have and can always buy an external drive in the future and get them to plug it in.

I don’t have any experience in setting up wire guard so I’ll have to look into that. I was thinking to use syncthing since that skips the need for that, but I think someone in the thread mentioned that may not be ideal in case of file corruption.

Do you just have raspbian on the pi?

[–] tuhriel@infosec.pub 2 points 4 days ago

On the one running on my parents side I run raspberryOS. I do have an rpi on my side which is triggering the script and vpn (and also backs up their NAS) That one is running NixOS, but raspberryOS works fine.