Category Archives: Virtual Homestead

Introduction

In this day and age, backing up your data has never been more important. With people’s entire lives stored as digital images and videos, it’s vital to keep family memories safe.

That said, I totally understand why people aren’t better about backing things up.

It’s difficult to setup and maintain.

Mac OS gets a call out for giving their users a free and feature-rich Time Machine bundled with the OS. Yet even then, many of them don’t properly use it by forgetting to plug in the backup drive regularly. Linux and Windows users seem to be in a similar boat where there’s a wide range of options, but none that are as easy to use while feature complete as Time Machine.

Making things more complicated in today’s world, it is not uncommon to have a dozen devices in a household. Imagine a four person home where everyone has a laptop, tablet, and phone. I’d imagine that a married couple with teenagers could easily find themselves in that situation. That is actually a scenario that I’d hope to find myself in within a decade or so. Having some network attached storage isn’t unheard of either.

It’s time for me to finally bite the bullet. It’s time to learn Bacula and setup a proper backup solution that can handle the needs of my wife and me. It must also be scalable for when newly spawned household processes arrive.

In the next section we will look at what a possible middle class household network looks like.

Hypothetical Home Overview

Let’s assume that this home is headed by Bob and Alice. Their children are named Chad and Wendy. Each of them has a computer of some sort, a tablet, and a phone. They share a 4TB NAS that is used for storage of dank memes and more.

Name	Computer	Tablet	Phone
Bob	Linux Desktop	Android	Android
Alice	Macbook Air	iPad	iPhone
Chad	Windows Gaming Laptop	Android	iPhone
Wendy	Chromebook	iPad	iPhone
Shared	4TB NAS storage

As we can see, Bob’s in for some pain. Family members simply want devices that work for each of them, with zero concern for how hard it is to back up a heterogeneous network. Compromises will likely need to be made.

Mountains of Data

Let’s assume that everyone in the family wants to know that anything older than 24 hours is saved somewhere, and isn’t going to be lost if one of their phones breaks.

What would the solution look like? I could see a Raspberry Pi with a large external hard drive being one part. Another part could be a Bluray burner that supports 50GB and 100GB blank discs. Maybe two external hard drives is the way to go?

Before we know that for sure, we’ll need to run some numbers. How much data are we backing up?

Name	Computer	Tablet	Phone	Total
Bob	500	64	16	580
Alice	256	256	64	576
Chad	1000	128	64	1192
Wendy	128	64	32	224
NAS	4000			4000
Total				~6600

We now know that one single complete backup of everything will take 6.5TB. Theoretically, 8TB could be enough to do daily incremental backups and monthly full backups assuming normal use. Obviously that’s not good enough. My dad raised me to design everything twice as big, strong, or resilient than was necessary. Knowing that, we’ll instead assume that we need 12TB of space for online backups to handle worst case scenarios. We’ll also want offline backups which adds another 12TB for a grand total of 24TB.

Wow. That’s 24,000,000,000,000 bytes for a single family…

What does storing that amount of data look like today in early 2022?

Media	Total Size	Total Cost	Cost / GB	Cost / TB
External 3.5″ HD	14,000GB	$280	$0.02	$20
Bluray 25GB	25GB	$2	$0.08	$80
Bluray 50GB	50GB	$1.80	$0.04	$36
Bluray 100GB	100GB	$6	$0.06	$60
Tape	who cares?	it’s too damn	expensive for	small families

That leaves us with two potential options:

Option	Startup Cost	Cost / Month	Cost / Year
Two Hard Drives (2 x 14TB)	$600	$0	$600
1 Hard Drive + Tons of Bluray Discs	$100	$500+	$6,000+

Which then leaves only one reasonable option for a typical family: two hard drive rotation where one drive is always offline.

However, that still leaves the possibility of complete and catastrophic data loss during a massive flood or an EMP burst. Adding in yearly Bluray backups for $500 seems like a reasonable compromise. It might also make sense to only have yearly Bluray backups of the NAS only. Then you’d only be looking at $150 a year in blank Blurays.

The savings could then be reinvented towards building an opulent 1980’s-style Cold War bomb shelter with matching green jumpsuits for everyone.

Closing Thoughts

It’s good to know that for less than a $1,000, any family could purchase all the hardware necessary to have a bullet proof backup solution. Unfortunately, I don’t have such a system setup yet.

That must change…

In the next post, I’ll be going over the hardware necessary to implement a backup solution for the user story above.

In an era inundated with plagues of thin-skinned people with too much free time, I feel it necessary to first state the obvious: I’m referring to removing serviceable parts for use in the repair of other equipment of the same kind. People eating other people is likely a micro-aggression by the time you’ve read this. This has been your trigger warning. #futureproof

— The Editorial Staff

It’s Time

Near the beginning of the year, I realized it was time for an upgrade. I had things largely figured out requirements wise, and was planned on pulling the trigger on purchasing everything in a couple weeks. I had priced out a reasonable video card that would do what I needed (PNY – XLR8 Gaming Single Fan NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER) for around $220. At time of writing, it’s now going for over $550 on Amazon. I saw similar video cards skyrocket during that time to nearly $1,000 dollars.

Oh shit…

My upgrade plans were suddenly in peril.

Don’t Panic

Knowing that panic is best to be avoided, I immediately forgot that advice. I ended up spending the next month or so battling the sort of defeatist ruminations our society has been so thoroughly plagued of as of late. I knew that panic buying expensive video cards was to be avoided, yet I knew not what to do. I waited for inspiration. Time then passed slowly and fast at the same time.

I spent a lot of time lamenting the lost of whole chains of computer and electronic stores such as RadioShack, CompUSA and Circuit City. (Technically RadioShack still exists, but it’s not what it once was.) I still don’t understand how it happened. When did it become so hard to get hardware? My old server reliably running for 10 years left me blindsided by how much the world changed. Compared to 20 years ago, it’s beyond my ability to understand.

This lead me to realize that I was becoming a greybeard. I’ve been programming, building computers, and whatnot for more than 20 years. I even have a bunch of gray hairs now (which I jokingly tell my wife are her fault). I’m a greybeard and I should be better than this. I owe it to my family and my wife to do better. It’s time to go level up past Gandalf.

Around that time I stumbled upon Micro Center. It reminded me much of what proper stores were like. I looked through their catalogue seeing the same thing I’ve seen everywhere else: sold out video cards.

Greybeard Plotkai

That’s when my new greybeard status kicked in. I’m not a victim. There has to be a better way to look at this problem. Do they sell the computers with the components I need inside them? Are the motherboards in them still a standard size? Will this fit in my existing 4U server case?

As it turns out, yes they do, yes they are, and barely yes on that last one.

Hell, even Costco has desktop computers with NVIDIA 1650/1660s in them for reasonable prices. If a 1660 costs $700, that $900 barebones kit with a 1660 is looking mighty nice. There is no law against turning a gaming rig into a proper server. I was already going to need a new motherboard, RAM, CPU, and other things. Why not get 80% of the way there with 20% of the money? Find a good deal, add $100 of RAM, and BAM! You’ve got yourself a server.

It’d have been nice to think of this earlier. Hell, I watched Moneyball. I should’ve seen this coming.

Conclusion

And that, my friends, is how I was able to upgrade my server within budget.

In our next episode, I’ll explore more about where I’m going with cloud software now that I have the metal. It’s down to ownCloud and Nextcloud.

In possibly a future sidebar, I’ll explain how convincing your wife to spend a whole day in the car hunting for computer parts is easier than you might expect. Sell the trip as an opportunity to try out a new restaurant in a new city. Buy tickets to a local art museum. By the time you get to “and let’s stop by Micro Center for 15 minutes” she’ll already be sold.

An Upgrade Is In Order

My current server is running a Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2100 CPU. Based on archeological evidence and carbon dating, experts estimate that it is around 10 years of age. It’s had minor upgrades over the years with a respectable 4 × 2TB drives setup in RAID5 for 6TB usable. However, it’s simply too long in the tooth. It’s been working flawlessly for so long, I seem to have taken it for granted.

I really only thought about it when I’d occasionally have to reboot it every couple months. Looking at it that way, I almost feel bad putting out such a long running workhorse to pasture.

End of the day, I should feel proud that I built a system that worked near flawlessly for a decade.

Mission accomplished. What’s the next mission?

Requirements

I’ve become a simple man when it comes to servers. All it takes me is half a dozen cores, heaps of memory, and terabytes of space to be happy. I’m wondering how much the hardware game has changed since I last went down this road. I’m hoping I’ll be left with the end result of a reliable workhorse for many years.

Off the top of head, here are requirements, typical workloads, and tasks the server will encounter:

• Building the personal cloud that spawned this thread
• Storing over 9,000 new photos and videos daily from my wife’s phone of our 8 month old cat.
• Video stabilization and other processing of grainy VHS home movies
• Secure storage of personal documents
• 3D scanner processing
• Minecraft server
• Git repo to avoid relying on Github too much

Here’s what I’m thinking will be sufficient:

• 8+ threads (with or without hyperthreading)
• 8TB+ of space in RAID5 (minimum 3 disks)
• 32GB+ of RAM
• NVIDIA for them CUDA cores, system stability be damned
• 500W+ power supply (Should need at minimum of around 400W according to newegg)
• 6 × SATA ports (preferably all 6Gb/s)

Parts List

• Hard Drives
  • Seagate – Barracuda 4TB Internal SATA $90 × 3 = $270
• CPU
  • AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core 3.6 GHz $200
  • AMD – Ryzen 7 3700X 3rd Generation 8-Core – 16-Thread 3.6 GHz $330
• Motherboard
  • ASUS – ROG Strix B450-F Motherboard $130 (more info)
• Memory
  • CORSAIR – VENGEANCE LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) $145
• Power Supply
  • CORSAIR – CX Series Modular CX750M 750W Power Supply $105
  • EVGA – W1 Series 600W ATX 12V/EPS $60
• Any NVIDIA video card that’s not been sold out due to cryptocurrency miners $200 (hopefully)
  • PNY – XLR8 Gaming Single Fan NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER $220
  • … and that’s about all that’s not sold out now.

Total: $1,000 estimated

Conclusion

If I can get 5 years out of this build, I’ll be happy. There’s a leap year in there. That’s a savings of $0.0003 per day. Cost of ownership should be around $0.55/day ($1,000 / (5 × 365 + 1)).