Before, I had a router with a dedicated USB port for storage. All I had to do was to plug a USB drive, tweak a few settings and the storage was available to laptops. Super easy to have a backup, and drag&drop sharing of files between laptops.
But, I switched to Sunrise fiber. The new router does not have a USB port for shared storage. I have to do manual backups to USB HDD. I’m thinking about getting a Raspberry to plug it to one of the ethernet ports of the router and make my own NAS. An Arduino would be a more elegant a lower energy demand solution, but…I’m not ready for that.
Better maybe, but not cheaper per-GB, and yes my assumption is that I’m going to read this backup only in case of a disaster. And it will indeed be quite costly if it ever happens.
Yes, I think it is good for one off backups/archiving that never changes. The problem for computer backups, is that if it changes, you need to then store a new back up and the old backups you pay for a minimum of 6 months. If you do daily backups, it is no longer cheaper this way.
I had the same setup - using the HDD connected to the router allows all the PCs and other computers to access the same data. The HDD can be kept in a ‘safer’ location too.
I have a “comms” cabinet set up in the storeroom where the power and internet comes in. Swisscom router (10GB fibre) sending through to a Unifi Dream Machine SE (includes HDD for the Unifi CCTV cameras). 24 Port PoE switch, Synology NAS and APC UPS (only lasts 30min, but generally stops 10min Unifi reboot if the power cuts out for any reason).
The advantage of Unifi is the transponder feature…basically a Unifi VPN connection to your home network from anywhere.
I have something similar set up. On my server, I set up WireGuard which creates a VPN so that I can access my files when outside the home.
I also installed it on my phone so that all network traffic goes via my home router. This can be useful if you are travelling and don’t trust some of the WIFI hotspots around.
I have Gl.iNET AX-1800 as my home WiFi, RPi 5 with 2xNVMe raid for NAS. I use rsync to make incremental backups leveraging hardlinks, pretty cool. It’s much like old time machine on macOS.
Apart from NAS, I run local git on it for Obsidian and any small home projects I don’t feel like I need to share anywhere. The services are exposed only on local network.
Big plus of this setup: I can take it with me anytime. I can even power them from a decent powerbank, both have USB-C power plug.
I have plans to put another RPi at some house amongst my family to do upstream replication, but it’s not critical. For now I only do once a week (if I don’t forget) an encrypted backup to a pendrive I always have in my wallet together with backup FiDO key. My critical data is really small. It consist of a few important photos but 99.99% of other media files are non-essential - I don’t really care if one day I’m going to loose those random shots from random vacation, etc. The NVMe in this setup are for reliability, not for speed. I wouldn’t trust SD cards for long term storage (somehow I had only bad experience with SD cards, pendrives from a good brand are much more reliable)
I’ve chosen RPi 5 because it has been designed with native NVMe support. Before I used RPi 3B+ with SSD connected to USB. Obviously there are other mini boards suitable for such setup, Radaxa, OrangePi, etc
I might consider it as an optional “cold” backup done once a week as my “pocket” backups. However as long as the SSD is regularly powered on it shouldn’t loose any data (of course quality depends on what you pay for, same with HDD). Obviously the advantage of SSD backup is transport safety if you intend to take it with you on extended stays out of home, etc.
