Backing Up My Home Server Files - Setting Up Syncthing

with the digital age heavily upon us people have become increasingly dependent on their digital assets whether that's work files school projects or even just your photos and videos today everyone wants access to all their files all the time now obviously you have to store these files somewhere and just as importantly you have to have a backup some people choose to store their files with a third-party cloud provider some people choose to just upload their stuff to social media and use that as their storage but the way larger companies have handled user data pass so to back up all of my files i've taken it upon myself and built a backup server look how cute it is an awesome part is that all the software it's running is 100 free so let's check it out [Music] okay so this is my new backup server now i wanted this to be as small and compact as possible because essentially this is going to get thrown in a closet somewhere and run 24 7 just to back up my files and how we did it was i went on ebay and got a combo motherboard cpu ram deal for about 60 bucks this is running an old i3 and the beauty of that is that the software we're using sync thing is extremely lightweight so this server does not have to be a powerhouse for the storage i went with two 14 terabyte uh spinning drives i'm running them in raid one so the backup server essentially has redundancy which is what you always want to have so let's put that away the hardware is going to change from person to person but the software we're using is what i want to discuss more so let me get everything set back up and plugged in and i'll be right back all right my backup server is plugged in right over there and it should be up and running i've actually set everything up a couple of days ago just because i had about two terabytes worth of data to get synced up so i wanted to make sure that was all up and running now we will be using a program called sync thing same thing is an amazing piece of software like i mentioned before it is free it is also open source and i am shocked at how well it works it's also available on windows mac and linux so no matter what operating system you're using uh same thing will work to sync files between any system you have so to get started you're going to want to just go to syncthing.net and download the package and install it depending on what operating system you're using now today i'm only going to be using the linux version so i'm not going to go through the entire installation process honestly it's very easy to do they have a good guide and they'll walk you through it depending on what operating system you're using so obviously if you're going to want to sync files between two or more computers you're going to want this installed on those computers so if we take a look at my setup i'll be switching between two screens and one of those being my backup server and one being my main home server so on the screen here you can see this device has this ubuntu standard pc this is my home server this is the vm that i'm running ubuntu on which is running sync thing now on this screen it looks extremely similar but this is running on my backup server which is also running ubuntu so i'll be switching back and forth and i'll try to keep a text box down in the corner up top somewhere to make sure you know which box we're looking at so when you install sync thing what it's going to do is it's going to spin up a web gui and you'll access that gui by going to your localhost or 127.0.0.1 and the port number which by default is 83.84 and once in here the gui is pretty streamlined there's there's not a whole bunch of fancy settings that you have to go through to get this working that's what i like about sync thing so the first thing you're going to want to do is decide what folders you want to actually sync so in my case i'm syncing two folders from my server directly to my backup server so in that case let's go to sync thing on my server and check out the folders i have set up now you'll see both of them are already here i have one called network underscore hdd server and plex server so essentially this network hdd is my 48 terabyte nas solution that i have running on trunas and plex is my 12 terabyte setup dedicated just for plex media so setting up a new folder is extremely easy you're just going to go to add folder give it a name a folder id it's got to be unique but i usually just name that whatever the folder label was and here's where you'll specify the path so wherever the path is on your machine that you want to share or sync you'll enter it here so for sharing uh you won't see anything here until you've added a remote device and we'll get to that in a second for file versioning there are a couple of different options you can go to sync things website and they'll explain more in detail what each versioning does but i've gone with trashcan so what that does is if a file is deleted it won't actually delete it it will keep it in storage for a specified number of days ignore patterns this is where let's say if you want to sync a folder but you know there's specific files in there that you don't want synced for example if you know we don't want any xml files we could do something like this and sync thing would sync the entire folder but leave out any xml files that it finds and then advanced you can specify a couple of different options now there's only two that i really change watch for changes this is if you want the box that you're checking this file on or this folder on to watch for changes and constantly pull the file system to see if anything's changed most of the time you're going to want to leave that on now the folder type there's three options here there's send and receive which is the most common and they're send only and receive only i'm actually utilizing the send only and receive only and i'll touch on that in a second and once you save it it'll be set up so let's go into my configuration and show you how i have it set up so here you can see folder labels plex server folder id is the same thing this is where i have that folder stored so it's in mount plex plex for file versioning i'm not running any file versioning on my server my home server but we'll see when i go to the backup that's different this is running a send only and the reason for that is because i'm only going to ever make changes on my home server and i want those changes to be only sent to the backup server and you'll see on my backup server that i have it set the opposite for receive only and that's because i'm not really going to go on my backup server and make any changes and in the event that something happens for some strange reason where a file's deleted on the backup server i don't want that pushed back up to my home server now we're looking at my backup server and if we go to those same folders they'll appear a little bit different so and the first thing you can see is while the folder label and folder id are the same the folder path is different and that's because obviously we have to store the data somewhere on our backup server and here is where you're going to specify where you want that to be done now i've set up that on a raid system under my mount file versioning now you can see here that i'm actually running the trashcan file versioning i thought i had this set for 30 days but guess what it was set to zero no ignore patterns and in advanced you can see like i said before this is going to be a receive only okay so how do i actually get my two servers talking to each other now that's where this remote devices comes in and you can see i'll switch back and forth but on our backup you can see we have a server remote device and on our server you can see we have a backup remote device now there's two ways you can think about linking these computers together now the way i like to think about it is what's the easiest way for one device to find another and when i say that i mean my server is always going to be at home and always going to have a static ip address on the other hand my backup server i could deploy it at home and give it a static ip address as well but what if i want to take that backup server and deploy it somewhere else off-site in that case obviously i would have less control over the network address it receives and all that good stuff but no matter what i always know the network configurations of my home server so with that said it's probably easier for my backup server to go out and find my home server so let's go to our backup server and so when you go to add remote device it's going to ask you for a device id so in this case i would go over to my server actions show id i would copy this address and then on my backup server when i go to add remote device i would just copy that under device id give it a name i named it server and then advanced and this is where you will enter the address of the machine that you're looking for and this is why i said let's set it up on the backup device because it's extremely easy for me to know where my server is my server is always going to be on 10.0.0.20 so my backup machine will always be able to find it now i know you're thinking okay well you said that you could deploy this in another state and still find it i have actually set up a vpn tunnel on my network uh using my pfsense router so that no matter where i deploy my backup server whether that's in my own house or in another state i can vpn back into my home network and i will be able to see any device on my home network including my home server so once you have this set up you will see a configuration similar to what i see obviously your folders will be different your remote devices will be different but then you're going to want to go ahead and share so what i'm going to do is actually set up a new folder to show you how it actually shares a folder across devices so we are on our home server or our vm running on our home server and let's say for example we want to share this pinger folder so in that case i would go to add folder and that was in home ubuntu pinger file versioning i'm on my server so i don't want any file versioning here i want my file versioning to take place on the backup and in advanced we are on our server or home server so we're going to send only we want to watch for changes and save so you can see we've created that folder but it is marked as unshared and that's probably what you'll see the first time you set up a folder with no remote devices once you have a remote device it'll look extremely similar here you can just select that save and now it is going to share with my backup when i go to backup immediately it's giving me a prompt in the gui saying server wants to share a folder pinger with you add new folder this is extremely convenient because i can just select add it sets up the entire connection for me it gives it the same name the same folder id all i have to do is decide where i want to store it we're going to go through the same thing obviously it's shared file versioning here we're on our backup so we're going to use trashcan versioning i don't know let's only do this for a week back up so we are receiving only and save so it's going to sync and apparently it was extremely fast and it's up to date so let's go and see if we actually have data and here's all of our files now what if we made a change over here so let's say let's add a new file uh test that text so now we have a test.txt file and if we go back over here you can see it's already synced so that was extremely fast so if we go in here and look at it there's nothing in it so let's go back to our server and say hello here here here is a change write that go over here very briefly it did a sync and what's cool is if you go in here it'll show you the last change so you can see it updated test dot text and deleted the swap file so if we go into that folder test.text boom it's updated it's synced across and if we wanted to revert that for some reason we could go in here and go to versions you can see we can restore it as the original version which was with nothing in it or restore it yes and now here's our test a text with nothing in it so that sync thing in a nutshell i am running a pretty simple configuration of it like i said before you can have multiple computers multiple file systems and this thing is running extremely well on an old intel i3 second gen 2000 series with four gigs of ram you don't need anything fancy to run sync thing and that's what makes it awesome i know i covered a couple of things in here that i could probably go into more detail about including my network configuration which i do plan on doing a video of but if you have any questions on anything i went over feel free to leave them in the comments i love reading the comments you guys put and the questions you ask it makes me feel like i'm actually helping out so feel free to ask away and if you like this video be sure to drop a like let me know if you plan on using sync thing or if you're currently using sync thing and how it's working for you be sure to subscribe because we have a couple more things coming that i think you'll enjoy so see you all the next one

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 47,624

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Id: V4kWJ8JcdtM

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021