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A good backup system is not only important, it is essential when a hard drive crashes, a virus infects the system, or you are victimized by ransomware. Luckily, the Raspberry Pi is ideally suited to run as a backup server in the background.
Many PC users are knowledgable about IT. Consequently, they automatically take on the role of IT administrator for their family. However, administrative tasks can be time consuming when a hardware defect or virus attack is involved. An additional frustration, which is often part of a family setting, is that recommendations to perform regular backups go unheeded.
Fortunately, you can build a small and economical backup machine using the Raspberry Pi and an external hard drive. This machine can then assume its duties without further maintenance. If you are a straightforward Windows user who does not have a large media collection, this article is targeted to you. Regular backups should run in the background without restricting the user. In the event that problems occur, it should be possible for the administrator to correct them without much effort.
The easiest way to secure data is to copy it onto an external storage device. While this is better than doing nothing at all, copying means that you have to perform some manual operations and potentially also risk overwriting previously secured data. The potential for overwriting gives rise to special problems when a virus or an encrypted Trojan has attacked the files that then get transferred to the external storage device. This excludes use of cloud storage like Dropbox or backup programs like Duplicati [1].
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If you're a Mac user and would like the convenience of the Apple NAS Time Capsule hardware without the expense, you can build a low-cost alternative with a Raspberry Pi and an external hard drive.
The Raspberry Pi is not powerful enough to support fully mature network storage. In situations involving smaller amounts of data, however, the little computer shines as a flexible data hub.
The Rasp Pi Zero comes with minimal equipment. To build it out, you will need an OTG adapter plus a USB hub. Makerspot has an interesting solution for this.
Whenever you're traveling, there's always a chance you could lose your camera, so you should save your pictures as you go. The Pi image bank can save images and even display the pictures via a web server.
Price $15.99
(incl. VAT)