Homelab - Backups
ZeroTier
Now that my server is up and running (and in RAID 1+0 instead of RAID0), my first order of business is to setup a way for me to access my Proxmox server from outside my home network. Enter ZeroTier. Honestly this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever come across and I’m shocked that I hadn’t heard of this before. It’s a software defined peer-to-peer networking solution that, for me at the present time, is much easier than trying to set up a VPN into my home network. It allows me to connect my server to my main desktop computer to my laptop (and 97 other potential devices I might add) all for free and it’s just a couple of minutes to get machines set up. If you want to have your network private you’ll need to authorize the clients to the network through the web console for ZeroTier, which is an easy process, but easy to miss in the fine print. I was able to set up all my devices in 15 minutes, if that. The possibilities with this are endless, but in the interest of actually setting up something on the server that will be used by other computers, I’ll move on.
Backup Solution
I’m paranoid about data loss. Mostly because it hasn’t happened to me yet, which makes me all the more nervous. Because of this the first thing I’m going to do is backup my two main computers, an Arch Linux laptop and Windows 10 Desktop. I created a VM in proxmox with Ubuntu server and gave it 256GB of storage. I gave it 4GB of RAM and 2 cores. Since the first backup will be the toughest, I gave it 16GB of RAM and 4 cores to start, but I dialed it down after that. Because both of my backup solutions use compression, I should be good on space. This is really just a temporary solution anyway until I get a dedicated NAS. I use Deja Dup for the Linux box and Duplicati for the Windows one. Deja Dup was slightly easier to configure, but I think part of that could be the fact that I’m backing up a linux box to another linux box. I could have set up smb on the ubuntu server, but I think in the end duplicati is just as good of a solution.
Honestly I think that the worst part of my solution boils down to disk space and network speeds. Disk space for all my VMs is severely limited since I decided to run my server in RAID 1+0. I also set up my proxmox install on a different logical volume to protect the OS and the VMs separately. I only have ~500GB for my VMs and my Ubuntu backup solution was given 256GB. We’ll see if I decide to change stuff up, but for now I feel good that I have another layer of protection for my data. My other problem is that since my server is connected to the internet via a raspberry pi in bridged mode, the download and upload speeds are pretty darn slow. But hey, it was a free server, and now it’s once again ‘in production’ providing me some peace of mind, and I think that’s pretty cool.
This is probably not the most elegant backup solution. But on the plus side it cost me nothing, backed up my data, and I learned a few things. Specifically creating a VM in Proxmox, using ZeroTier to connect my devices, setting up Duplicati and Deja-Dup.