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Backing-up Single Board Computer (self.selfhosted)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by Krafting to c/selfhosted

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hello everyone!

I have a small OrangePi running some small services on it (some with Docker and some without Docker).

And I'd love to know how do you backup your single-board computers.

Do you just rsync the system to a storage server ? Do you plug in a USB drive and rsync on it ? Do you save only the important data or the whole system ?

For now my SBC is not backed-up and I'd like to get a good backup solution up and running quickly! (I don't trust SD cards to last long...)

I have access to USB drives and disks and also another big server with 20TB of storage which I can make the backup to if needed!

Thanks for your help !

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I only have the OS on the sd card and I pop that out and dd a copy to my backup drive every 6 months or so. For that reason I like to use small sd cards like 8gb size. All other drives on the machine are external or network drives and those have their own backup routine with rsync.

Do you use only the sd card or what kind of storage system do you have on your sbc?

[–] Cenzorrll 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You don't need to pop it out to DD the SD card, you can do it while it's running. I like to pipe DD through gzip to get a compressed image as the output so I'm not sitting on 16gb file for 3gb worth of files.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That sounds really good but is that safe to do? I thought you shouldn't dd a disk if there was some activity going on on it.

So is the output image saved to the SD card or do you save it to an external drive?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Been working fine for me for several years.

You can have it written to an external drive, or you can use tools like sshfs and ftpfs to mount remote servers as local drives then write to those. I use the sshfs route.

This will create an .img that you can just write directly to an sd card and boot from.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Very cool, thank you.

[–] Krafting 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The SBC is only running with a SD Card and nother else plugged in. But I suppose my best bet is to run a script with rsync and save what I need using rsync over SSH to my storage server

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

The only down side I can see with that setup is that should the sd card fail you'll have to reinstall the OS on a new card and then install and configure all the programs you had before. For my set up that would be a pain in the neck but it depends on your specific use case.