Hello! I’m new to Kopia and the concept of backing up my own IT assets in general, so I may not be real familiar with the jargon around this topic, but I’m happy to explain anything further if this doesn’t make sense.
Right now I have a small server running some services, and I would like to back up the data that those services generate. Due to hardware constraints on the server (it only has 2GB of memory, and I’m already pushing that limit), I don’t think I can run Kopia directly on that server. So, I was thinking I could run Kopia on my desktop computer and use something like Samba or SFTP to select directories from the server as snapshot targets. Is it possible/advisable to use Kopia in this way? If so, how do I do that?
As long as you can make any kind of network mount (like Samba or nfs) of the remote system, you can then run a local “kopia” against that mount-point and get a backup of the remote files. As for how adviceable it is, that is hard to say. I would try running kopia on the remote machine just once to see if it does eat too much ram or not before deciding against this idea. With a fixed or at least small-sized splitter, none or light compression (gzip) and splitting up the snapshots to many subdirectories instead of one for the whole drive, it should not take too much memory.
Also, doing snapshots against a repo created by some other machine would be an idea so that this machine doesn’t do the maintenance of the repo.