Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
view the rest of the comments
The problem with that statement is that you're likening a redundant but dependant copy to a backup which is a redundant independent copy. RAID is not a backup.
As an easy example to illustrate this point: if you delete all of your files, they will still be present in a backup while RAID will happily delete the data on all drives at the same time.
Additionally, backup tools such as restic offer compression and deduplication which saves quite a bit of space; allowing you to store multiple revisions of your data while requiring less space than the original data in most cases.
It's totally possible to make a backup of the root filesystem tree and restore a full system from that if you know what you're doing. It's not even that hard: Format disks, extract backup, adjust fstab, reinstall bootloader, kernels and initrd into the boot/ESP partition(s).
There's also the wasteful but dead simple method to backing up your whole system with all its configuration which is full-disk backups. The only thing this will not back up are EFI vars but those are easy to simply set again or would just remain set as long as you don't switch motherboards.
I'm used to Borgbackup which fulfils a very similar purpose to restic, so I didn't know this but restic doesn't appear to have first-class support for backing up whole block devices but it appears this can be made to work too: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/949
I must admit that I also didn't think of this as a huge issue because declarative system configuration is a thing. If you're used to it, you have a very different view on the importance of system configuration state.
If my server died, it'd be a few minutes of setting up the disk format and then waiting for a ~3.5GiB download after which everything would work exactly as it did before modulo user data. (The disk format step could also be automatic but I didn't bother implementing that yet because of https://xkcd.com/1205/.)