On Sun, May 10, 2026, at 10:18 AM, G.W. Haywood wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> On Sun, 10 May 2026, backuppc@sundquist... wrote:
>
> > ... working on G.W. Haywood's excellent instructions ...
>
> You're too kind. Let's see if they work. :)
>
> > ... I had to first set up a new machine. The machine that crashed
> > was a raspberry pi (with a nvme instead of an SD card - still
> > crashed), so I am ditching that and went with a miniPC. I installed
> > a flavor of ubuntu. ...
>
> Since November 2019 I've been using a Raspberry Pi as one of several
> backup servers, and it's been fine. To my mind there will always be
> questions about USB-connected drives, but after what I think I'd have
> to call a fairly shaky start with them on the older (pre-Pi3B+) Pis
> they seem to have settled down well with one notable exception. That
> (unfortunately) is my wife's desktop machine, which for years has been
> dropping its USB-attached disc after uptimes of anything between a few
> days and a few weeks. We're still looking for the problem. Replacing
> hardware and software wholesale has so far failed to pinpoint it. All
> our other Pis have been fine even as fairly heavily loaded (for a Pi:)
> database servers. OTOH *every* mini PC that I've used has, without
> exception, been solid.
Not backuppc-related, but I had the problem of usb drives dropping from another
mini-PC (that one running insync to backup my files to google drive (my offsite
backup)). So now I run this script from cron daily, piping the output to a log
file:
---
#!/bin/bash
cd /
device=`ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/dc01e09e-ab4e-46d0-b639-d0c302d3b9f2 -l | awk -F/
'{print $NF}'` #find which file in /dev/ is my disk
if [ _"`grep /dev/$device /etc/mtab`" = _ ] ; then
mounted=0 # there is no record of this device in /etc/mtab
date
echo "Device /dev/$device is not mounted"
mount /dev/$device /backup
cd /backup
chmod -R a+rw .
else
mounted=1 # record found => mounted
date
echo "Device /dev/$device is mounted"
# umount /dev/$device
fi
---
This works to keep it mounted. Both that mini-PC and the one I just got for
backuppc are old Lenovo thinkcenters you can get relatively cheap on ebay._______________________________________________
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