I’m new to Kopia and don’t see any advice on the best remote option if I have a choice.
My current setup is a Raspberry Pi 5 server, or an old laptop running Linux as my servers, with external HDs attached. Because they’re running Tailscale I can access them over my LAN as a local mount with sshfs (“Local directory”), SFTP, Rclone, or WebDAV. I can also install Kopia server on them. I’m new to S3 but it looks like I could set up minIO and access as S3 also.
Is there any advice which is best re backup performance / speed / bandwidth / reliability? For a single file restore, I assume performance is irrelevant. For a full restore, I can presumably access the drives directly and plug them directly (USB) into the restoree.
In theory the best option is to use kopia server… BUT. It requires quite a lot of work to do this right IMO and is not perfectly well documented. You can find some good threads with a lot of details and solutions for some nitty-gritty aspects on this forum. It is a bit of learning curve.
Myself if it is for small(ish) local backup I would go for the easiest option available. Probably SFTP or WebDAV. It will be slower than serve but if it is not 10s of TB sometimes there is no point to fight for some performance gains.
PS. rclone is no go. It has massive issues with performance together with kopia. It is experimental (as per docs) for the reason.
@budy what do you think? You have more experience dealing with kopia repos of all sizes and kopia server.
Well, there’s not really a good general answer, since there are too many factors at play. I must confess though, that I’d always would go for a Kopia server, if I would want to setup any remotely accessible Kopia repo. Especially, if you are planning on using several clients backing up to the same repo.
Kopia server is not that hard to set up and it beats the crap out of any other repo connection, other than a drive attached locally to the host you want to snapshot. It will also take care of the maintenance tasks on its own, since it owns the repo - very handy. I can’t recall an instance over the last 3 years or so, where any one of my Kopia servers - at home, or at work, had any repo issues.
Running a Kopia server keeps the setup simple and fast, I guess that’s what it is to me. I am even running a Kopia server at work (Hamburg, Germany) which receives its snapshots from a client located in Vienna, Austria without issues.
Thx! Maybe I have to look at server option again. I tried once but was put away by sparse documentation. Or maybe I tried to bite too much with going into settings too many options at once.