How do you manage your data?

[Felid131]

My main PC has two Crucial MX500 solid state drives. The first drive is 250 gigabytes and contains a 1 gibibyte FAT32 filesystem mounted at /boot/efi, an 8 gibibyte swap partition, and the rest of the space is taken up by an ext4 filesystem for root(/). The second drive is 2 terabytes and is taken up entirely by an ext4 filesystem mounted at /home, currently at 497 gigabytes used.

I have two portable hard drives for backups. The older one is 1 terabyte and the newer one is 2 terabyte. At least one stays in my locker at work, and I swap them each day to keep a relatively up to date off-site backup. Which ever one I bring home gets backed up to after my computer use of the day and before running updates before going to bed. Both drives are LUKS encrypted containing an ext4 filesystem. A simple script I wrote is used to generate a list of my installed packages and then backup to the drive with rsync once I mount it. The encryption keys for the drives get stored automatically in Gnome Keyring so mounting is a simple one click operation.

My main PC is the central hub of my digital storage. Anything important gets put onto it and makes its way into the backups.

Here's my lsblk and df -h(the four blank sd* drives are from my multi-card reader):

Code: Select all

~$ lsblk
NAME                                      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                         8:0    0   1.8T  0 disk  
└─sda1                                      8:1    0   1.8T  0 part  /home
sdb                                         8:16   0 232.9G  0 disk  
├─sdb1                                      8:17   0     1G  0 part  /boot/efi
├─sdb2                                      8:18   0     8G  0 part  [SWAP]
└─sdb3                                      8:19   0 223.9G  0 part  /
sdc                                         8:32   1     0B  0 disk  
sdd                                         8:48   1     0B  0 disk  
sde                                         8:64   1     0B  0 disk  
sdf                                         8:80   1     0B  0 disk  
sdg                                         8:96   0 931.5G  0 disk  
└─sdg1                                      8:97   0 931.5G  0 part  
  └─luks-9e2190b8-af83-48a0-9bd0-de969b1f0e4c
                                          254:0    0 931.5G  0 crypt /run/media/<redacted>/BackupDrive
sr0                                        11:0    1  1024M  0 rom   
~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs         16G     0   16G   0% /dev
tmpfs            16G   28M   16G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs            16G  1.3M   16G   1% /run
/dev/sdb3       220G   35G  174G  17% /
efivarfs        128K   88K   36K  72% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
cgroup           16G     0   16G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdb1      1022M  152K 1022M   1% /boot/efi
/dev/sda1       1.8T  464G  1.3T  27% /home
tmpfs            16G  1.9M   16G   1% /tmp
tmpfs           3.2G  9.2M  3.2G   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/dm-0       916G  464G  406G  54% /run/media/<redacted>/BackupDrive

What about you?

[Kolev]

I have an external hard drive that everything gets copied to:

• home directories
• media
• books
• photos

I need to back this hard drive up to another hard drive...

[zonk]

I'm gonna start off-topic and ask why you allocated a whole gibibyte for your EFI partition. You should only need a few MB max for that.

Now for my real answer: I have many NASes running TrueNAS CORE (sadly it's being discontinued, but TrueNAS SCALE will still be around). One is at my house, and I have scripts to back up my personal files to it nightly. All my music, movies, and photos are stored on there and mounted via NFS on my PC. That NAS has a nightly rsync job to copy all the files that changed that day to my remote systems for off-site backups. Each month, I plug in an external hard disk and run a script to back everything up onto it for cold storage.

The NASes do not have equal capacities, but they're around 6TB with ZFS file systems in various configurations.

For certain things I will also back up onto optical media, but I don't do that for very much.

[Crazyroostereye]

I'm gonna start off-topic and ask why you allocated a whole gibibyte for your EFI partition. You should only need a few MB max for that.

Honestly my EFI is also a Gig. I once had less, but I had it once overfill because I was doing stuff and dealing with that was Pain. Also, I have enough storage to do so.


My Laptop runs ZFS as its filesystem, but I don't have any System to send my Snapshots away. The only things actively being Backed up are My Financial Data and images which get synced to my Server.

The Server itself also having ZFS Pool runs a Weekly full backup and Daily Differential Backup, that is sent it to a Cheap NAS we had lying around. There are Plans to back up that Data to an Offsite Backup point but no concrete plans have been made.

The available Capacity of the Server is currently 2TB (2x2TB Drives RAID 1). But a round of Upgrades are planned for him, including a Storage Upgrade to 12TB (2x12TB Drives RAID 1) as there are things that haven't been Incorporated into the Server that really should be. Like Media Libraries and so on.