I am backing up using Kopia from a bunch of family computers all to a TrueNAS server.
The server is home built so it is running a full desktop CPU and not one of those atom offers you see from companies. and it runs both NAS over SMB as well as various applications.
I am currently using SMB to connect Kopia to my server, since it was the easiest to setup.
I want to move away from it into something that does not require mounting a directory to connect.
Kopia gives me tons of options. I can switch to sftp, webdav, or rclone.
I am trying to figure out which should I use.
Are there any mines to avoid here, any major performance issues? security issues? difficulty of setup?
Or are they mostly equal and I can just use whichever is easier to install on my server?
BTW, I ruled out S3 since it seems to store everything in a singular file which seemed like a bad idea.
was that a mistake? is running my own S3 server via minio actually a good idea?
Kopia is very well suited for S3. It also doesn’t store everything in one single file - what makes you believe that? I can’t vouch for the performance of any method over the other, but I’d go with either S3 or a native Kopia server.
If it is local/low latency LAN I would go with SFTP. Solid standard and all should work out of the box - both server and client side.
WebDAV requires extra setup work (https) to secure it - even if it is local network you do not want to let anybody to be able to wipe out all backups belonging to others.
S3 requires installing minio and then extra work in maintaining it - good learning though so if it is for fun it might be good option too. BTW - never seen stuff being stored in one file… maybe you looked at wrong place…
kopia server is good too but also requires extra setup work - the same as with S3 - fun and learning if you dont mind.
I am not quite sure where I read that minio will store all contents of a bucket into a single file (similarly to a VMWare virtual HDD file). Thank you for clarifying this is not the case. That brings it back into consideration as a possible route.
My first instinct was to install kopiaserver. but there is no such app being offered by truenas. so that would require me to actually make a custom docker container. Which, if it was the only option I might have done. But since I am spoiled for choice I might as well be lazy and pick one of the many other options. Not using a custom container also makes updating whatever method I use easier since all the other methods have 1 click software updates in truenas
I did not realize webDAV required HTTPS. makes sense. For some reason I never managed to get HTTPS to actually work on truenas. IIRC it just refused to accept the certificate created by my provider. (I suspect the problem is with the provider and not truenas)
Thanks for all the advice. I think I will try FTP first. And when I have more time fiddle with the other options. It would be nice to learn how to setup a home webDAV or S3.