Best practices setting up with a Raspberry Pi and Windows 10

General Topics
1

Hiya,

First, some context: I have a Windows 10 desktop that needs backups, and I have recently came across Kopia after finding out “File History” in Windows is unreliable, to put it extremely generously.

I’ve set up two repositories, one with a GCS backend, for critical data on this system, and one with a local filesystem backend, the said filesystem currently being an exFAT USB flash drive with Bitlocker on. The second repository is a strict superset of the first.

For the last week that I’ve been using Kopia like this, it’s been great. But I wish to make some improvements and couldn’t quite figure out how I am supposed to.

On Linux, I have a setup based on Borg where I back up to an encrypted (LUKS 2) thumb drive attached to an always on RPi2b (or 3b, I don’t remember exactly), over local network, relying on mDNS, as my local backup solution.

I would like to have something similar for Windows 10 where I have this exFAT thumbdrive attached to the RPi (linux can deal with Bitlocker via disklocker package) and have Kopia do regular full backups to it multiple times a day (I do it every 6hr on linux, via systemd), automated.

Now for the questions:

  1. What backend and config to use with RPi? SFTP? I couldn’t figure out which one and I don’t have the time to experiment until in a few weeks, until when I need reliable backups. So worst case, I am more willing to just attach the USB every other day and manually run snapshots, but if there’s a no-hassle way I can set this up rn, I would fancy to know about it.

  2. I wish to use the same exFAT+Bitlocker filesystem on the USB thumbdrive, and I wish to be able to back up to it either over the air by having it plugged into the RPi, or just plugging the USB into the computer. The reason for this is, in case the RPi or network fails, I need access to my backups, and Linux and other Unix-likes’ file systems on Windows is a sad story. I know access is possible, but i find the solutions unreliable. With Borg on Linux I am able to do this, but I couldn’t figure out about this new Windows + RPi setup.

P.S.: My RPi still runs the ancient Debian based OS that RPi’s used to run on, I think it is Raspbian. So far I hadn’t had the time to update it, I follow the security updates and sometime soon I will set it up with a proper Debian or perhaps NixOS. But for the time being, messing with the RPi is out of the question. I don’t have the leeway for such a project.