{"id":3697,"date":"2020-03-23T10:00:41","date_gmt":"2020-03-23T15:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/?p=3697"},"modified":"2020-07-10T11:06:59","modified_gmt":"2020-07-10T16:06:59","slug":"get-your-files-organized-have-a-backup-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.foell.org\/justin\/get-your-files-organized-have-a-backup-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Get (your files) organized & have a (backup) plan!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Suddenly I find myself trapped in my own home due to COVID-19. It’s not really a big deal because I work from home<\/a> normally. But it has changed my weekend plans drastically. So it’s time to start tackling one of my 2020 goals:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organizing all of our digital files and having a consistent back-up strategy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Organization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At our house important files mostly fall into two realms: Photos and Music. Many people have at one point decided to keep all of their photos or music with a 3rd party service like Flickr or iTunes. That’s fine, but you just have to be prepared to commit to them like a marriage – except they decide all of the terms – it’s not a mutual agreement. Personally, no matter if I upload my photos to a 3rd party service, I always keep the originals on a disk in my home so I can own my own content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this becomes an issue when everyone in your family isn’t on the same page. I have some photos on a USB drive and on my computer, and my wife has done the same on a different USB drive and computer. We need a way to have photos accessible in a consistent place, and make sure they’re getting backed-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to shopping for a big hard drive to store all of this stuff, I try to find whatever is the best space-per-cost within my budget. At one point I had devised a “2×100” rule: I get the biggest drive I can for $100 and consider buying two of them (for redundancy). As disk sizes increase, once a drive is available that is 2x the size of my current one for $100, I replace them. Currently you can get up to 4TB drives for $100<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I bought a 4TB drive to use as network attached storage to act as our central storage place. I attached it to a Raspberry Pi using a USB\/SATA hard drive dock<\/a> and share it read-only over the network using Samba<\/a>. It shows up as a Windows-style network share on all computers and other devices like AppleTV & FireTV (using VLC<\/a>). For read-write access, I use SSHFS<\/a> so authenticated peeps can write to the disk and move files around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’re still working on how to consistently name our photo albums, but having them in one place that gets backed up<\/strong> off-site is a big win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Backups<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I used to be an amateur network administrator. In my back-office (laundry room) I had a tower server that had 6 disk drives. A 3-disk RAID5 for backups, a 2-disk RAID0 for temporary storage (for MythTV recordings), all in swappable drive trays. Then there was one more disk hard-mounted for operating system boot-up. It worked for a while, but when I was going to have to replace the 1000-Watt power supply for the second time, I thought maybe there’s a better way. One thing I hadn’t considered before is: the more disk drives you have, the higher chance of having a drive fail – an increased chance of the click of death<\/a> was always in the back of my mind. Using one big disk with a Raspberry Pi is much simpler, smaller, and uses much less power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With all disks on-site, there is still the chance of everything getting destroyed by fire. To handle off-site backup I had used CrashPlan, but that didn’t pan out<\/a> – time to look for something different. Since we have quite the collection of different computers here – Linux, MacOS & Windows, I looked for a consistent backup solution that is operating system agnostic. I wound up going with Duplicati<\/a> using Backblaze’s B2<\/a> for off-site storage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of our computers use Duplicati independently to backup to B2. The Raspberry Pi does as well to backup our photos and music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Setup<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I’m still working out (and documenting) the details of our setup, but I’ll list the specifics of our setup here as I get to them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n