Zimaboard Backup Server with Duplicati

0:00 what's going on tech enthusiasts and home lab heroes welcome back to the channel today we're taking a crucial step in protecting all the hard work that you've poured into your home lab losing your data is a nightmare and we're not going to let that happen in this video we're tackling rockolid backups using the awesome Zema board and we'll be setting up duplicati to create weekly encrypted backups for your precious data and to top it off we'll be sending those backups securely to the cloud as a third state so if you want peace of mind knowing your home lab is safe and sound stick around and let's get [Music] started in our increasingly digital world data is the lifeblood of

0:47 everything we do from cherished family photos to critical business documents its value is immeasurable but what happens when the inevitable strikes a hard drive failure a power surge even a simple accidental deletion can lead to catastrophic loss that's where a robust backup strategy isn't just a good idea it's a necessity and at its core lies a deceptively simple yet profoundly effective principle the 321 backup method the mantra is clear back up before you well you know but what exactly does this seemingly cryptic sequence of numbers

1:32 signify the first digit three speaks to redundancy you must maintain three distinct copies of the data you hold dear think of it as a safety net woven with multiple strands these three copies can exist in various forms perhaps your primary working files reside on your main computer the first layer of defense might be a second hard drive within that very machine or spread across a network of interconnected devices imagine a home network with data mirrored across several computers each a potential safeguard but simply having multiple copies in the same location isn't enough this is where the second digit two comes into play your backed up data needs to

2:17 reside on at least two different types of storage media consider the inherent limitations of any single storage technology hard drives can fail mechanically ssds can experience electronic issues and even the most robust server can succumb to unforeseen hardware problems by diversifying your storage perhaps one backup on a traditional hard drive another on a faster more resilient SSD or even a dedicated network attached storage device you mitigate the risk of a single point of failure wiping out all of your backups simultaneously cloud storage with its geographically dispersed infrastructure offers another distinct media type even physical discs though less common for primary backups today represent a different form of storage

3:02 finally the crucial last digit one at least one copy of your precious data must live offsite separated geographically distant from your primary location and your local backups think of the potential for localized disasters a fire a flood even a break-in if all your data and backups are in the same place they are all equally vulnerable an off-site copy acts as the ultimate safety net a lifeline to recovery no matter what falls your primary location cloud storage emerges as an ideal solution here offering both a distinct media type and remote accessibility far removed from the confines of your home or office take for instance the setup of

3:50 one dedicated data guardian their primary data lives on a home server affectionately nicknamed cave like mine but the protection doesn't end there within KFIX itself a second hard drive to it designated drived acts as an immediate local backup a digital mirror ensuring a recent copy is always close at hand then a carefully orchestrated digital ballet unfolds every week as the clock strikes 2 a.m on a Saturday a script initiates meticulously copying selected data onto drived 3 hours later at 5:00 a.m another process kicks in duplicati a specialized backup application running within a container on a small power efficient Zema board diligently pulls this data from the

4:37 primary server onto its attached SSD but the journey doesn't end locally from the ZMA board this second backup embarks on its offsite voyage silently uploading to the vast digital landscape of Google Drive this elegant solution not only provides a third copy and a distinct media type but also ensures that the crucial off-site requirement is met without bogging down the primary server during peak usage hours the 321 method isn't just a set of arbitrary numbers it's a fundamental principle of data resilience it's about building layers of defense ensuring that no single point of failure can lead to irreversible loss in a world increasingly reliant on digital information embracing the 321 rule isn't just best practice it's peace of mind so

5:25 let's show you how to do this now I just want to be upfront and honest i received this device the SEMA 83 uh1 free of charge might be 832 832 completely free of charge from uh Zema board um and the guys over there at Ice Whale um and it's a fantastic device it's brilliant to use as a backup server and this is going to sound like it was a complete setup but I'm here to tell you that during the filming of this video I think I was hacked um I think uh someone managed to there must been a poor configuration on my end on my reverse proxy but someone managed to get into uh my my my media server and they just

6:11 wiped everything they just deleted everything now although I didn't back up all my media files all my films and my music and things like that that can all be downloaded again even though that was like four or five years worth of collection um what I actually had backed up was all my compose files all my scripts all my personal photos things like that um and certain data files that enabled me to get back up and running really quickly such as Prowler all the RS apps image things like that and oh my god this was a godsend because whatever happened um to my main data it actually wiped out my local backups too but it didn't manage to spread to the Zema board and it didn't manage to spread to

6:57 my Google uh drive backup as well so I'm going to show you exactly how we can set this up now there are a couple of ways you can get this up and running you can get the compose file which I'll put a link in the description below for you uh but being that this is a Zema board I am going to show you the method of installing this through Casser OS simply because we are using it because it's on the ZMA board so once you've got your ZMA board all um logged in and set up and everything the first thing you want to do is head over to the App Store in the App Store you can quickly search for Duplicati and there you go do not click the install button instead just click on the icon itself then at the top you'll see a little arrow next to the button install click

7:43 custom install we always like to roll the latest so we're going to hit the latest tag you do you and then we're going to head down the bottom a little bit the port by default is 82000 you can keep that the same um or change it if you want to if you are going to change it due to conflicting ports just change the host side don't change the container side the next thing you want to do is head over to your volumes you're only ideally going to need three but you can put in as many as you need as time goes on and your setup becomes more complicated the configuration directory as always on CS OS starts with data app data the app ID is filled out for us so it'll say duplicati and then config for the folder then we've got our two other volumes the

8:29 backups volume and the source volume so the source volume can be a network share it can be a local SSD it can be a other type of attachment or file anywhere the source files are now in my case I uh used the network share from my primary server in this field so you can either do that if you want to and conveniently you can press these little squares on the side here in Castro OS and this will take you down to wherever you need to go so if you've got any mounts in here for example the network drives you can literally just go in here and then select what you want to be as your source backups are basically where you're going to transfer these files

9:15 through Duplicati where does where do you want Duplicate to send these files now in my case I would normally have an a portable SSD attached to this but I am currently using that to um restore some backups on my other computer as I mentioned earlier on had a bit of trouble while filming this ironically um which is is quite crazy but yeah but so that's uh currently restoring on another version of Duplicati on my main server just cuz it's a bit quicker than going over the network um but again you can select anywhere um on your mount points um on your system hell you could even put in the root system here uh and and just back that up but bearing in mind some files will be locked if it's a live system um for demonstration purposes I'm just going to copy the um documents

10:03 folder now down below in the environment variables we're going to need to add a few extras this is why you don't just click install so for this we're going to need two extra environmental variable slots the first one is going to be for and I'll put everything in the description below for you the dup duplicati web service password if you're installing this on Windows um you'll notice in the bottom rightand corner you have a tray icon which actually conveniently just logs you in as you open Duplicati if you're running this in Docker on any platform Linux Windows Mac whatever you're going to need this this is where you get to set the interface password so you can log in yourself um and the other one is going to be the

10:50 settings encryption key which is going to be uh the thing that basically encrypts all the backups now you can set individual passphrases as well on all your backups but it is highly recommended to have an encryption key as well these things need to be um very secure you can make them uh pretty long um but yeah you're going to want to put um you know anything you want in here but just make it complex um again you know maybe a few capitals as well whatever you want to do chuck it in there just make sure you're using something like a a password manager like Vault Warden i have a link in the description below if you need to go and check that out um Vault Warden is a open- source free version of Bit Warden uh which comes with all the normally paywalled features but they're free so I've got a cool video on that then

11:37 something very interesting because a lot of your containers you usually um will run with your uh hierarchy user on the system that you're running on which generally is user 1000 however I have come across a very interesting thing i don't know if this affects everyone but it certainly affected me when I was restoring the backups to their destinations i was getting a lot of errors saying um you know access denied access denied this that and the other um and it turns out because obviously when you pull your backup especially if it's over a network and it's coming from a different computer system altogether like I have my primary Linux server and then this is my ZMA board backup server it's going to pull those files but with

12:23 those permissions so you need to kind of emulate something that's higher than the permissions um so you you can access and read and write those files in my case that was 0 0 which translates to the root user now most people wouldn't do this um because they wouldn't want to give their container more privileges than necessary however we're not going to tick the privileges box down here we are just doing this purely for emulation so that when duplicate is reading and writing those files back out it's it's got the the root user permission and again it might work for you with a 1000 feel free to try that if you disagree but this is what I did and and it worked for me um and that's pretty much it they're

13:08 the only different things that we need to add to that file um again take note of your passwords that you have created um and we should be good to go and you've copied the Duplicati web service password we can now click install and just like that Duplicate is now installed and set up if we hit the three little dot menu here and go to settings and we go at the top to terminal and logs and go to logs we can see that the server has started and is listening it it did boot up relatively quickly and you can see that our user UID and GD are 00 so we click on that all we got to do to run this by the way is just click on duplicati and then it will open up duplicati we're going to log in and we're going to paste in the password

13:54 that we set in the environmental variables as the duplicate web service password which gets us in and this is our blank slate now bearing in mind if we go back over here to the settings menu remember that our source directory we put as a as a connection over the network and then our backups directory we've got as the documents so essentially what that's going to do is so don't forget in our documents um directory if we are saving our backups in here we are going to want to create a folder within the documents uh folder and we're going to label that backups and we can certainly do that at this point we're going to click in there

14:40 and then we've got data documents backups again this could be anywhere on your system that you want to on mine it's literally mount backups because I created a mount point for SSD but again this can be anything that you want and then we're going to quickly save that again and that's okay and again we can just quickly connect now or refresh the page and we're good to go and the first thing that we want to do here is actually just go ahead and start adding our backup um now you can either import from a previous configuration file if you've already done this before and you're kind of restoring maybe on a different computer um or you could just click configure a new backup here we're going to call this backup um network network shares we're going to create

15:28 a passphrase which we can use as the passphrase that we set earlier on and this is where we're going to decide where we're going to put our backup directory now lucky for us backups has already been set in the environmental variables for us which is in our documents folder on the host system test that connection and it's worked next we're going to say where the source data is that we want to back up now lucky for us the source data is our network share source now if you want you can have this run every week every day every single five minutes whatever you want you can put in here um what we're going to do is actually set this to sometime in the future but we are going to run this today and then we're going to set that to run every week then the

16:15 remote volume size in my case I'm going to set that to 2 GBTE file sizes you can put anything you want however small you want what this basically does is it splits up um the encrypted backup so that they're multiple files smart backup we're going to do delete all backups older than uh I tell you what we can do we can just do keep specific number and I'm going to say keep two backups at all time and then we're going to click save so we have our network shares backup ready to go and we're literally going to click run now simple as that it would normally run on its own but we've had it run here and just like that that has now backed everything up simple as that really

17:00 that's how you install Duplicati that's how you get your backup running again you can configure where the data is where it goes what folders it saves in things like that and restoring the files is pretty simple you can literally go in here find all the source materials if we had many files in here it would be all listed down here now we could go to continue if it wants to go to the original location or pick a location do we want to overwrite or save the files until we want to restore the read and write permissions which we generally would at which point we can click restore and boom just like that our files or folders have been restored now of of course this is a you know dramatic simplification but you get the idea it's a very comprehensive suite of tools that

17:46 you can use to keep all your backups and if you follow the tips at the beginning of the video you're not going to go wrong the other thing that's really cool in here is the fact that you can actually add a backup in here say for example my photos let's say we encrypted that as well but at the top here storage type as the destination we can change so you can have FTP you can go to Google Drive you can have one drive Dropbox anywhere you want to save so we can have a second backup on top of that so for example if we go to Google Drive and we put backups there so for the O ID if we click on OD here it'll

18:33 open up a uh a login screen basically for our Google Drive account continue we can now copy this or ID paste that in test the connection connection work which means it now has access to our Google Drive next the source data again we'll go to computer right down to source next when does it run again we'll set it to the future just so we can quickly do a run and again we'll do up to two GB files smart we'll do again two backups every time no

19:21 more save give it a few [Music] seconds my photos let's run that backup it then uploads to there and the cool thing about this is you could have this Google Drive upload on the back of your network shares upload so you could have it exactly running like that 321 schedule you'll have your first copy on your primary server you could have your second copy on a second hard drive on that primary server the third copy could come here to network shares in our uh duplicati on

20:07 the zebra board and then the offsite backup in the 321 can literally be up to your Google Drive and that's successfully backed up and now if we wanted to restore those files it'll find them for us and we can just do restore red permissions and it'll restore them from that location downloads the files and off they go now the only warning here is the simple fact that there are no files in there but you get the idea so I hope that's been of an interest to yourself that's a quick way of turning a ZMA board into the ultimate backup tool there are a lot of different apps that you can run on the Zema board because it has Caser OS installed but essentially that's the primary function I'm using it for is just duplicati it's using less

20:54 than six watts of power i mean 1.5 right now anyway it's just the perfect companion for lowcost backup material really and again I normally put a portable SSD attached to this the SanDisk Extreme which I'll leave in the link in the description below if you're interested you can connect SATA hard drives up to this you can connect um the SSDs via USB or SATA the possibilities are endless with it has a PCIe 2.04 time slot on the side so you can put extra network cards in anything really goes with this board it is a fantastic tool so once again thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next one