Automated backups that work are mind-liberating! I'll share in this and the next post how I've solved it for my use case in my homelab.

In this first post I want to explain my goals and my overall setup. In the next post I'll explore in detail how I handle encryption. I'd also love to hear how you handle your backups: share in the comments.

What does my system solve?

I like to think of my backup system in terms of the thread model against the chaos and karma of the world. Which kinds of problems do I want to be protected against? After showering a couple of times, I informally had a list on my head. Here it is, transcribed:

1. if I do something dumb, like deleting all my photos by accident, I want to recover that data (true story: when migrating from Google Photos to Nextcloud, I've removed the wrong folder 😇).
2. if my machine breaks, I want to recover my data
3. if my house catches fire, is looted, or transforms itself into a pumpking (not true story), I want to recover my data
4. if a stranger has access to any of the disks, they must not be able to access my data
5. if ransomware compromises my server, they cannot erase my backups
6. if I'm not available or just lazy, the system should mostly continue to work
7. if the system has problems, I should be notified
8. if the system silently stops running, I should notice
9. if in-disk data is inconsistent while the owner app is running, it must be stopped to flush the data
10. if a copied file gets corrupted or rots, it should be identified
11. if the writing patterns on the disks are similar, they should not fail at the same time due to correlated wear and tear

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This is a quick post just to share how much my homelab costs me. Since it's an old laptop tucked near the fridge, one can guess it's not a lot. But I've got measurements!

I've measured 3.382 kWh in 11 days 3 hours and 54 minutes (=267.9 hours), so an average of a bit less than 13 W. In a 365-day year, this adds up to 110.6 kWh.

My current energy contract has a fixed cost and a per-kWh cost that depends on the hour of the day:

	Cost
fixed	15,65 €
03:40 - 07:40 and 12:40 - 16:40	0.1579 € / kWh
the rest of the day	0.2065 € / kWh

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I'm a happy user of Forgejo and I host it on my homelab at git.sitegui.dev to store all my open source code (including this very same page).

However, as many other hobbyists and major projects, I have noticed an uptick in the number of crawling requests that my instance serves. My homelab is literally an old laptop close to the fridge, so I could hear the extra load (and it also doesn't help that Europe is scalding with 16 degrees above average temperatures for May).

I saw an increase from an average of 1 000 requests a day to 200 000. The issue is not only the number of requests, but their nature: these bots go over the whole git history to navigate the whole tree of files for each commit. They also request a lot of repo archives that are expensive to generate.

The robots.txt clearly forbids bots to navigate to these pages:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*/*/src/
Disallow: /*/*/archive/

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This very website is served from my home by an Ubuntu Server running on old hardware behind my fridge:

I've talked in a local dev meetup about my setup, you can check the slides here:

My homelab is at the same time a "production" environment for my digital life and "staging" environment for all sort of crazy project that I want to play with. It's amazing what 10-year-old hardware is capable of!

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