--- /dev/null
+---
+title: "NAS Part I - The Build & Borgbackup Initial Impressions"
+date: 2023-05-15T20:40:00+03:00
+description: "Almost a year later, the rumours about untimely death of my NAS build have been greatly exaggarated"
+tags: [backup, linux, review, opensource, opinion, nas]
+type: blog
+draft: false
+---
+
+# NAS - Part I
+
+If you have been reading since last year July, you may know of my "Project ReuseNAS" - you may also
+know that my build date estimate for "end of 2022" or "Q1 2023" was never met as per obvious lack of posts on that front.
+
+When I was originally planning the NAS build, I was very much all over the idea, that I could reuse all of my old PC components.
+Over time after discussing with members of the based.quest community, we came to the conclusion that I would be severly handicapping
+myself with the hardware I already had laying around.
+
+I was unable to find a satisfactory case for the NAS build that could hold the HDDs on them - apparently cases with 4x 3.5" + 2x 2.5" bays are quite uncommon,
+as such I ended up buying a brand new case.
+
+Further I did not trust getting an used power supply or used SSD/HDD drives. CPU cooler I most likely could have found used, but the project was starting to drag
+on for far too long - so I ended up getting a brand new one. I know, impatient.
+
+My original plan was also to buy 4x4TB IronWolf Pro drives - as of right now, I only got 2x4TB IronWolf (non-Pro) drives.
+
+The final rig ended up being:
+
+CPU: i5-2400 (Second-hand)\
+CPU cooling: be quiet! Pure Rock 2 (Brand new)\
+Motherboard: MSI H61MA-E35(b3) (Second-hand)\
+RAM: 4x4GB DDR3 from my old "Celery Fujitsu" PC (Second-hand)\
+PSU: Corsair CV550 (Brand new)\
+Case: Krux Naos TG (Brand new)\
+HDD: 2x4TB Seagate IronWolf (Brand new)\
+Boot SSD: 2x120GB Patriot (Brand new)
+
+As of writing this, a few of these are still being shipped, but that didn't stop me from starting the experimentation, using my current PC as the test-bench.
+
+## The borgbackup
+One simple Friday evening, as I had finished getting final parts of the NAS - I asked the matrix chat for suggestions regarding backup solutions I could use.
+My criteria was simple - it must be able to do incremental backups and potentially deduplicate. I was thinking of some hacky rsync solution already until
+Kerum stepped in with the idea of using [borgbackup](https://www.borgbackup.org) - I was intrigued, it offers space efficient storage of backups, LZ4 compression,
+mountable backups with FUSE and claims to be easy to setup.
+
+Without wasting further time - I decided to take my 2x4TB drives out, attach them to my main PC, build a software RAID 1 and install borgbackup.
+What I discovered was everything I could have asked for from a free solution and beyond.
+
+Let's start with the extras I wasn't expecting for -- the backups are all encrypted. If your HDDs get stolen for whatever reason, your backups are secure.
+Further you are secure from malicious actors - you do NOT need borg on the remote site even, you do not need to store any passwords on the repository server.
+
+About performance - your initial pass is always going to be slower as borgbackup has to make note of blocks for deduplication and also encrypt the data.
+However, this is why I wanted the ability to do incremental backups - you only have to move what you need. Your next passes however, will be a lot quicker - depending on the
+amount of inodes in your server. For me, an incremental backup takes about ~ minutes presently. Here's a summary from the last backup I just took (presently manually, going full-automatic
+once the NAS final components have shipped!).
+
+```
+Mon 15 May 2023 07:10:29 PM CEST Starting backup
+
+/path/to/<redacted>.log: file changed while we backed it up.log
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+Repository: ssh://<user>@<nas>:<port>/path/to/borg-repo
+Archive name: cernodile-2023-05-15T19:10:29
+Archive fingerprint: 42cc287287f3c2f9d34308844ad3f18b15f53333d9eeb3e9b71ad1c89c33b063
+Time (start): Mon, 2023-05-15 19:10:30
+Time (end): Mon, 2023-05-15 19:16:53
+Duration: 6 minutes 22.94 seconds
+Number of files: 741792
+Utilization of max. archive size: 0%
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ Original size Compressed size Deduplicated size
+This archive: 197.53 GB 149.67 GB 1.58 GB
+All archives: 971.53 GB 754.30 GB 151.90 GB
+
+ Unique chunks Total chunks
+Chunk index: 530571 4076474
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+terminating with warning status, rc 1
+
+Mon 15 May 2023 07:16:59 PM CEST Pruning repository
+
+Keeping archive (rule: daily #1): cernodile-2023-05-15T19:10:29 Mon, 2023-05-15 19:10:30 [42cc287287f3c2f9d34308844ad3f18b15f53333d9eeb3e9b71ad1c89c33b063]
+Pruning archive (1/1): cernodile-2023-05-15T06:15:29 Mon, 2023-05-15 06:15:31 [4266d525a871b036cb71f0ba0f8930e1dcd04499fa5293deba87305497fe957d]
+Keeping archive (rule: daily #2): cernodile-2023-05-14T01:08:46 Sun, 2023-05-14 01:08:48 [0dc46a3106d1df91170fb60d0661a1b6ca92fc50694acfa8833745dd302d1fd6]
+Keeping archive (rule: daily #3): cernodile-2023-05-13T09:09:41 Sat, 2023-05-13 09:09:41 [f0be5704c565202b405ac833e1256fd320ce0968946bfabfd3312d3a1aa3afc2]
+Keeping archive (rule: daily[oldest] #4): cernodile-2023-05-13T00:51:50 Sat, 2023-05-13 00:51:51 [14be5350fa55603c65e897c5a6f37925943b7c5eed793db386d5090464d6a18a]
+terminating with success status, rc 0
+
+Mon 15 May 2023 07:17:18 PM CEST Compacting repository
+
+
+Mon 15 May 2023 07:17:34 PM CEST Backup, Prune, and/or Compact finished
+```
+
+I seem to face a visual bug regarding the warning status (no actual warning is output!), but other than that, I've had no real issues so far - I have verified integrity of the backups (each one!), all match up.
+
+Note the original and compressed sizes here. The original backed up data (aka actual FS usage) is 197 GB which gets compressed down to 149.67GB! With 3 other archives visible here, you can see that the incrementals have only added up about 3GB (which roughly aligns with the daily amount of data added too ~1GB/day).
+
+## FUSE the backups!
+As mentioned before, borgbackup supports mounting your backups with FUSE provided you have the space for it. Let's say I accidentally make changes I didn't really intend to today and I didn't make a backup of it.
+So I want to naturally take my nginx.conf back from the previous day.
+
+To do that, I go back to my PC terminal and check for my existing restore points with `borg list /path/to/repo`:
+```
+$ borg list /path/to/repo:
+Enter passphrase for key /path/to/repo:
+cernodile-2023-05-13T00:51:50 Sat, 2023-05-13 01:51:51 [14be5350fa55603c65e897c5a6f37925943b7c5eed793db386d5090464d6a18a]
+cernodile-2023-05-13T09:09:41 Sat, 2023-05-13 10:09:41 [f0be5704c565202b405ac833e1256fd320ce0968946bfabfd3312d3a1aa3afc2]
+cernodile-2023-05-14T01:08:46 Sun, 2023-05-14 02:08:48 [0dc46a3106d1df91170fb60d0661a1b6ca92fc50694acfa8833745dd302d1fd6]
+cernodile-2023-05-15T19:10:29 Mon, 2023-05-15 20:10:30 [42cc287287f3c2f9d34308844ad3f18b15f53333d9eeb3e9b71ad1c89c33b063]
+```
+
+As I said before, I want to see /etc/nginx from previous day, in this case, May 14th. To do that, I'll have to use `borg mount` as such:
+```
+$ borg mount /path/to/repo/::cernodile-2023-05-14T01:08:46 /mnt/ /etc/nginx
+Enter passphrase for key /path/to/repo:
+$ cd /mnt/
+$ ls -lh etc/nginx/nginx.conf
+-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.5K 26. apr 23:33 etc/nginx/nginx.conf
+```
+
+Voilah! We have retrieved the configuration file that was present that day! Now we can retrieve the contents of it using whichever preferred utility you wish or transport it directly
+to the server with scp/ftp/sftp.
+Once you're done, run `borg umount /mnt`.
+
+## Future concepts to look into
+I want to see if it's possible to make my backups immutable in event of cernodile.com or based.quest being hacked.
+
+## Conclusion
+Overall my first impressions so far are very positive, there is so much I haven't discovered yet with this backup solution and it is everything I could have asked for.
+For my use case, this is ideal. The backup script I use is available in borgbackup's own documentation. I recommend you read up on that as well if you are as interested
+in borgbackup as I am.
+
+I am glad to finally have my NAS and backup solution set up, it's been a long time coming.
+
+Thank you so much for reading, hopefully without this long of a delay next time,
+- Cernodile
projects / web-hugo.git / commitdiff