Help with an Inexpensive Data Back-Up Machine

Kintarō Hattori

Hey Folks,

I have my most important information backed up on an external HDD and flash drives but I think I need a more permanent and elegant solution to this. Currently at home I have:

A Dell Optiplex 7010 with 16GB of Ram and a 1050Ti which is used as a Steam machine for my older games

A HP Elitedesk Mini 800 G4 (haven't really found a use for this yet but it's a nifty little machine. Space for an SSD and two NVME's

A Dell laptop with a single slot for an SSD

None of these strike me as particularly ideal for something which will just sit there and back up photos/video. At the moment I can't go nuts on a machine so have been milling some idea's around in my head such as buying a small mini-ITX case and doing something from there. Or acquiring an older Optiplex and putting dual 3TB drives into it and raiding them.

I've never had a machine solely dedicated to back-ups and I know inexpensive and data back-up don't go hand in hand. Lying around the house I have a load of DDR3, an unused 240GB SSD, so am open to building something based on older hardware.

Any suggestions?

Wombatman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058244563/help-with-an-inexpensive-data-back-up-machine

The Cloud. OneDrive, Google Drive etc.

mp3guy

I use NextCloud which is checked out on a few of my machines, so my own personal cloud with multiple redundant copies. As easy to use as Dropbox.

Kintarō Hattori

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119018901#Comment_119018901

I do use Google Drive but would like a physical machine with which I can dump files to.

Kintarō Hattori

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119018932#Comment_119018932

That looks great, I'll look to sort out a machine though first.

Jon Doe

What do you mean by elegant? What's wrong with external storage? I'm biased against online services... it's all fine and dandy until it fails... then it's all hands on deck making phone calls to every support number you can find! Have you considered a NAS?

mp3guy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119086522#Comment_119086522

Nextcloud is best of both worlds, convenience of cloud services with the control of a NAS. External storage is all fine and dandy until it fails (experienced more disk fails than cloud storage service fails tbh). One power surge or drive death and you're toast. Or even worse, house fire. Cloud/distributed back up gives you offsite backups without the hassle.

xckjoo

Two bay RAID? I've had a two bay external enclose for year and it hasn't given me any trouble. You could do it in software in a mini PC too if you want to go down that road.

Nextcloud with Wasabi cloud mount for offsite backup was the cheapest option I could find. Mainly set that up for backing up photos, etc from phones but I've also recently started backing up big files to it from the PC.

No issues so far with either but haven't had any failures to deal with so who knows...