Network Accessible Hard Drive

[Karl Auer]

On Tue, 2023-04-25 at 23:05 -0500, Aaron Rainbolt wrote:
> I would strongly recommend using a native Linux filesystem like ext4.

I strongly agree.

> How much data do you have to back up? Keep in mind that you may want
> to keep multiple versions of files.

Also very important. If each backup overwrites the previous backup, and
you for whatever reason back up bad data, you then have no backup.

> The drive you mention is a usual USB drive. Do you already have
> plans for how to make it network-accessible?

Network accessible storage for backups is way better than directly
attached storage, unless you have multiple drives and cycle through
them. Any attached storage is vulnerable to whatever might attack the
machine it is connected to, from voltage surges to ransomware.

Unless cost (or portability) is a major concern, I suggest getting a
NAS. They don't have to be huge, multi-disk affairs, you can even get
single-disk NASes these days. For a small NAS like that, what it offers
is simple network connectivity and typically also versioned backups,
encrypted volumes and so on out of the box. And of course, 99% of
backup software will be able to work just fine with a NAS too. Finally,
a NAS abstracts the actual filesystem and presents a networked
filesystem instead. It can usually be divided into volumes, back up
from one volume to another and insulate some volumes from network
access.

You then back the NAS up to external USB drives and keep at least one
off them off the premises.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer