I’ve been thinking for a long time about solidifying and formalising my backup procedures. To be honest, my existing system is pretty awful, even though it’s caused me problems in the past.
Existing Backup solution
On my desktop, I have an SSD where my operating system (Xubuntu) lives. This drive is 250GB. I have an HDD, which is 360GB called “coffee”, which is where I store photographs, music, videos, download, etc. MOST of what I download ends up here, but some ends up on the SSD when I forget to move it.
I also have numerous external hard drives, where a collection of media I’ve built up over the last decade lives, in a pretty awful folder structure. Some of this is duplicates, some of it isn’t, some of it is corrupt, some of the hard drives are dead.
I know for a fact that the majority of photographs I took between 2006-2010 are gone forever, because the drive I was storing them on died.
Sarah’s files
Sarah’s laptop is slightly better in some ways, and much worse in others. It’s better because File History in Windows 10 is turned on, but worse because:
- -The drive that the file history is on is one of my many external hard drives
- -We never connect the drive
- -Her filing system is non-existent.
*It’s really bad. Her Music is so scattered and so poorly named that it’s going to take me a while to get it sorted out. I’m going to try out a few different tools for automatic tagging and renaming, see where it gets us.*
FreeNAS & HP Proliant Microserver
I’ve played with FreeNAS before, and I love how it works and what it can do, but I’ve never had any dedicated hardware to run it on. That’s changed now that I’ve bought one of these:
I’ve begun setting it up and getting a working FreeNAS install on it, but I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about how it’s going to all work and fit together.
I’ve got a few basic requirements:
- Have regular backups from Sarah’s laptop
- Have regular backups from my desktop
- Have a network share configured on it for all of our pictures
- Have a network share for all of our Music
- Install the OwnCloud plugin
- Our phones must auto-backup images to Owncloud
- Owncloud must somehow share the storage space so that our images are visible from Owncloud and our phone images are visible on the network share
Once this is all done, I want to be able to do the following:
- Access the music shares from Kodi, on my raspberry pi. The Raspi is hooked up to my amplifier, and I want to control what it’s playing from my phone.
- Access Owncloud from the internet. This will be a small project all on it’s own
I need to make a few decision about how the shares will work. If I’m already backing up everything from Sarah’s laptop, do I want to use Windows File History to make the backups, or something else?
If I use File History, then it’s going to dump all versions of everything in a network share. I don’t really want all the old versions to be visible to every other device (and Owncloud) that is using that particular share or dataset.