A Raspberry Pi-Based System to Back Up Your Important Files
Check out this Raspberry Pi-based backup system created by Redditor thinklearndo and avoid cloud storage.
Most people are increasingly relying on cloud-based storage services for their files and backups. Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, and many more services provide vast amounts of storage at low costs and sometimes even for free. But you should be wary of those services and there is reason to avoid using them for important files. There are obvious privacy concerns and even if you’re not worried about those, it is always possible for them to lose your files or for you to lose access. To maintain complete control over their files, Redditor thinklearndo used a Raspberry Pi to create their own backup system.
The motivation behind this project seems to have been financial, as thinklearndo wanted to avoid paying for Google or Apple cloud backups. But it should work equally well for the paranoid among us. It relies on a USB thumb drive as the storage medium, but this is a redundant backup. Those thumb drive come in massive storage capacities these days and are usually quite reliable. If it does fail for some reason, the original files should still remain intact. This system simply creates a daily backup of all of those files and makes them accessible when away from home.
The idea here is that every day after getting home from work, the user plugs their USB thumb drive into the Raspberry Pi-based device. During the night, the Raspberry Pi will sync with the user’s home backup server. Any new or updated files on the USB thumb drive will move to the backup server and vice-versa. Because the computers on the home network save their files to the backup server as a network drive, this system ensures that all files are up to date at the start of every day.
The standard version of this device is based on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC) and doesn’t require any additional hardware besides the 3D-printed enclosure. But because Raspberry Pi SBCs are so hard to find right now, thinklearndo designed an alternative version based on the Onion Omega2+ SBC. The Omega2+ is ridiculously compact and doesn’t have any ports (including USB ports), so thinklearndo created a custom PCB expansion board with a USB port. You can make that PCB yourself or order it through thinklearndo’s Tindie store.
