Got a Cubietruck as a small (literally) and low power (really) server. Main purpose is to have an off-site backup so I don’t need to continue to use CrashPlan. CrashPlan is nice generally, but it has show-stopper-quality problems. And those are not being addressed at an acceptable speed.
The solution is: boxbackup at a friend’s house. In return I host his off-site backup. BaaS we’d call this nowadays: Backup-as-a-Service.
Resources
- A small Internet connected PC with a disk which should be available 24/7
- boxbackup-server running on it
- some 500GB disk space being available
Implementation
Get a Cubieboard 3. Get a 500GB 2.5″ SATA disk. Set up forwarding rules for the Internet-facing router.
Configuration
OS is on an SD Card. Debian Wheezy in my case. Instructions see here and here. Worked like a charm. If using the serial console (highly recommended), make sure this is in the uEnv.txt file:
root=/dev/mmcblk0p2
extraargs=console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200 hdmi.audio=EDID:0 disp.screen0_output_mode=EDID:1280x720p50 rootwait pan
ic=10 rootfstype=ext4 rootflags=discard
Note the “console=ttyS0,115200” part: without it, there is no serial console available.
Next steps
- Connect 2.5″ disk to the Cubietruck with the supplied cables.
- Configure boxbackup-server
- Set up network connectivity to the remote backup (port forwarding, tunnel, etc.)
- Do a backup