Thanks for the tips. I’ll definitely at least start with mdadm since that’s what I’ve already got running, and I’ve got enough other stuff to worry about.

Are you worried at all about bit rot? I hear that’s one drawback of mdadm or raid vs. zfs.

Also, any word on when photoprism will support the Coral TPU? I’ve got one of those and haven’t found much use for it.

Yeah, I wouldn’t dare.

The fact that I migrated from a 3 drive to 6 drive mdadm raid without losing anything is a damn miracle.

I wanted to get something with a lot of upgrade potential, and this was the cheapest option to get my foot in the door with an EPYC processor.

Also needed two PCIe slots that could do at least 8x for the hba card and Intel ARC for video streaming.

Current hardware is an ancient fanless motherboard from 2016. RAID6 is through mdadm. Four of the drives are through a super slow PCIe 2.0 1x card.

New motherboard (just ordered) is a supermicro H13SAE-MF which has dual nvme slots and a built in raid controller for them.

Doing that every day feels a bit impractical. I already do that every few months.

So I’m kind of on the fence about this. I ran a raid boot disk system like 12 years ago, and it was a total pain in the ass. Just getting it to boot after an update was a bit hit or miss.

Right now I’m leaning towards hardware nvme raid for the boot disk just to obfuscate that for Linux, but still treat it delicately and back up anything of importance nightly to a proper software raid and ultimately to another medium as well.

Wouldn’t this require the service to go down for a few minutes every night?

Doesn’t this just pass the issue to when the snapshot is made? If the snapshot is created mid-database update, won’t you have the same problem?

So are you thinking like a raspberry pi with an 18TB hard drive accepting nightly backups through restic?

Lucked out on eBay and got it for $50.

My new motherboard actually has a RAID controller for the M.2 slots. I know people frown on hardware raid, but given it’s the boot drive, it might just be easiest to count on it for daily operation and backup to the software RAID/something else every night.

I’ve heard that too. Hmm.

Up until recently, the server mostly hosted a photo library and media library that didn’t tend to change very often. So a hdd in a fireproof save updated once a year was enough for me.

I guess I’ll have to come up with a better solution. What would you recommend for automatic backups? I’m trying to avoid 3rd party services.

Picked up a LSI SAS 9305-16I. I was always planning to do software raid, so I think it’ll do the trick for zfs.

Can you suggest a method for two-destination daily backups that don’t involve a 3rd party service? At the moment, I’m doing every six months or so on two sets of cold storage, one offsite.

Yeah, I’m only serving one timezone, so if I can swing nightly backups at periods of low activity, I’d only be out 1 day which isn’t that big.

Hm… My new motherboard does actually have dual NVME M.2 slots. I might end up doing that (once my budget recovers a bit).

Can you elaborate? (learning a lot at the moment).

My thought was to just copy over the whole database directory every night at like 2am. Though some of the services do offer built-in database backup tools which I assume are designed to do what you’re talking about.

I understand all of that. Sorry I didn’t explain it well.

I have a RAID6 for data and a single HDD for system files. I’d like to move the HDD to an NVME/SSD. I suppose I could make another RAID with an additional NVME, but I’ve found it easier to deal with booting off a traditional drive.

My solution for redundancy for the NVME is to just backup the bits that I need every night. These are usually just a few hundred megabyte database files. I’m curious if that’s a typical solution.

edit: to clarify, it’s a software raid with mdadm.

I just finally got it this weekend when I got Matrix-synapse and Pixelfed working on the same box.

All I can say is good for you! It wasn’t easy. And it’s so powerful.