April 8, 20251 yr Hello, i have put myself into a bit of an awkward spot when it comes to backing up my two unraid machines. Right now i am pulling by backups via the disk shares using SMB from a third 'Backup Machine' to swap-able drives. This was working fine for years, even restoring after a drive failure was super easy, since all i needed to do is copy the most recent backup set back to my unraid server. Unfortunately there are some problems with this solution: 1. Its very manual. I need to put the four Backup drives into the backup machine myself. After that it pulls the corresponding backups automatically. That is something i don't have to much of a problem with, since i fill up my drives one by one and thus have a pretty good idea of what needs to be backed up. Well. Sort of. Changes happen. 2. Changes... This was working cause my files where mostly static. Unfortunately embedded Metadata exists and for whatever reason Metadata people pitchfork you to death if you even think about sidecar files for jpg/mp4 files. 3. My current Setup relies on checksum and Dates to determine if a file changed and if it did, the entire files gets copied. Changing a single Keyword in an MP4 thus means the entire files now gets backup wasting tons of storage. I tried Block level but that never worked as expected via SMB... Given there are a bunch of changes coming to my server anyways i thought this is a good time to find a better solution for my backup problems. I already tried to do as much of my homework as possible and landed on the following solutions and corresponding problems: 1. Duplicacy (Web GUI) Very mixed opinions on that, both here in the Forum as well as around the web. I also was not able to figure out a smart way of setting it up for my use case. If i run it on my unraid machine i need to somehow mount my backup drives. USB is not an option and also wouldn't work with Docker mounts, since they would fail given that only 4 drives are ever present at any given time. I could setup a SFTP Server on my Backup Machine to avoid mounting issues, but im afraid that might be slow af. I could also install duplicacy on my backup machine and try to mount the source drives there, but again Block level stuff never worked that well for me before... 2. Borg | Borgbackup Seems to be pretty hyped right now. I haven't looked into it as deeply as i probably should have but it looks very complicated... However it does seem to have special Borg to Borg backups that could help my with my clunky physical backup setup. 3. Not sure there is a third option. UrBackup seems like a possibility too, but im struggling to find content on it. What do i want to back up? Ideally everything to some degree. I have about 40 TB of blu ray rips on my first unraid Machine. Im OK with just having a local copy on a external drive. If both should fail i could still recreate all the data from its original Discs (isn't physical Media great?) Second Machine is full of tiny little media files (aka my digital live). I do have offsite backups for that already (i store 2 external Hard drives at my grandparents house). Before anybody suggest cloud: I'm in Germany. We don't get upload here. 4 Gbit/s down 50 MBit/s up. 100 Mbit would be 100 Euro/Month extra. Even saturating the 50 Mbit/s i get for more then a couple of hours has resulted in my ISP throttling me back to 16... I could put a Appdata/Config Backup into Cloud storage tho. TLDR What backup solution would you use if you have to backup 2 unraid Arrays to a backup machine that can only mount 4 drives at a time? Duplicacy Borg or something else?
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