On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 7:52 AM, Miles Keaton <mileskea...@gmail.com> wrote: > Got a fileserver with a few terabytes of important personal media, like all > old home movies, baby photos, etc. Files that I want my family to have > access to when I die. > > Really it's more of a file archive. A backup. Just rsync + ssh. Serving > it isn't the point. Just preserving it forever.
When you die, will there be somebody around who knows how to access these files? I have a file server running OpenBSD and I have both NFS and Samba configured. Samba is the important one if you want people who are less technically savvy to be able to access the data. Samba makes the files easily accessible from a Windows system. Make sure your survivors know how to access this data or your efforts are for nothing. Even with RAID10, your data is still at risk. A fire, for example, can trash everything at once. I back up my server to tape. As businesses upgrade to the latest tape technology the older stuff becomes available relatively cheaply, especially used. I got a used SAS LTO4 tape drive and a SAS controller for it (one OpenBSD supports) on eBay for a good price. LTO4 tapes have a nominal capacity of 800GB uncompressed, or 1600GB compressed; in practice with my particular data I get about 950GB. To protect from loss due to fire, I keep a full set of tapes stored someplace over 100 miles away from my home. Use cron jobs to automate tape backups, then all you have to do is remember to change the tape in the drive. I have a cron job that does a level 1 dump every Sunday so the only thing I normally have to do is change tapes once per week. Periodically I will do a level 0 (full) dump but I do these manually because they will span multiple tapes and a cron job doesn't work well for those. FFS/FFS2 filesystems in OpenBSD work reliably, but fsck can take a while to run on bootup if the server didn't shut down cleanly (e.g. after a power failure). My server is running on fairly old hardware and it takes between 30 and 60 minutes to fsck 6TB of space after an unclean shutdown. Putting your server on a UPS will help you avoid unclean shutdowns due to short power failures, but extended outages will eventually exhaust the batteries. It's possible to have the server automatically shut down when the UPS batteries get low but I don't do this because I'm sure that as soon as I start the shutdown process, the power will come back on. I hold out until the bitter end even if it means a longer fsck later. -ken
