I have good use of Keep to keep my files synchronized with daily backups. Lately my Keep has some hardware issues so that I cannot connect an external USB disk anymore.
As I understand it you are not planning on releasing any new version of Keep. I have therefore looked at alternatives.
Do you think that the following setup clould do the job with syncronizing files and take daily backups? Two raspberry PIs with Ubuntu server, one with Nextcloud server installed and the other with a Nextcloud client and a backup cron job. I have started with the backup server since Keep is still working fine with syncronizing the files.
I tried to install S3QL as file system, but it proved to be too tricky for me. It does not seem to be supported on the newer versions of Ubuntu. Do you think Btrfs could be a decent choice for the backups? It has a snapshot features and copy-on-write which would mean that that different backup copies of the same file does not take up much extra space.
Successor of Keep
Re: Successor of Keep
Hi Harald!
You are unfortunately correct in that a followup to Keep most likely wont happen. We never managed to get enough revenue out of selling these setups to justify the work put into it. Sad but true.
Regarding backups, i actually thought Nikolaus had stopped developing S3QL, but that does not seem to be the case. When looking into it now it even had a release 3 weeks ago. It is however correct that Debian does not package it anymore.
(Seems correct that development stopped but then restarted again : "I have recently started working on S3QL again")
We where very much aware of this while working on the latest, never officially released, software upgrade. We then ported the older version of S3QL to Bullseye. Unfortunately i would hesitate using S3QL in a new setup.
Regarding your backup it all depends on what your needs are. I'm not quite sure on how you intend to use the two RPis. Are you going to use the server one fronting users and then use the client one to pull the data out of the server one, storing it using a Btrfs filesystem and snapshot that? A side note here is that the RPI is not particularly powerfull. Performance is on par with Keep but no more. (We have the Keep software stack running on RPI as well)
I think this would of course work but could be a bit problematic when handling multiple users. (But if it is only for you it should be fine) We use s3ql to mirror the complete Nextcloud storage area, among other things, for all users.
We where investigating S3QL replacements during development of the upgrade and the current solution we where going to evaluate where Rclone in combination with restic which seems like a potent replacement with an active vibrant development community.
Please let us know how you proceed with your own setup and how it works out!
And with all that said i would like to point out that we actually have the complete Kinguard software stack running on, in principle, any device capable of running Debian Bullseye. Virtual machines, Raspberry PI and other single board computers. Our repositories currently support Debian Bullseye on X86_64, 32 and 64 bit Arm.
And if anyone would be interested in helping out with development of this we just might be able to produce a new software release. There is a lot that never have gotten released. I would gladly help out with any spare time, which unfortunately is not a lot.
All the Best!
/Tor
You are unfortunately correct in that a followup to Keep most likely wont happen. We never managed to get enough revenue out of selling these setups to justify the work put into it. Sad but true.
Regarding backups, i actually thought Nikolaus had stopped developing S3QL, but that does not seem to be the case. When looking into it now it even had a release 3 weeks ago. It is however correct that Debian does not package it anymore.
(Seems correct that development stopped but then restarted again : "I have recently started working on S3QL again")
We where very much aware of this while working on the latest, never officially released, software upgrade. We then ported the older version of S3QL to Bullseye. Unfortunately i would hesitate using S3QL in a new setup.
Regarding your backup it all depends on what your needs are. I'm not quite sure on how you intend to use the two RPis. Are you going to use the server one fronting users and then use the client one to pull the data out of the server one, storing it using a Btrfs filesystem and snapshot that? A side note here is that the RPI is not particularly powerfull. Performance is on par with Keep but no more. (We have the Keep software stack running on RPI as well)
I think this would of course work but could be a bit problematic when handling multiple users. (But if it is only for you it should be fine) We use s3ql to mirror the complete Nextcloud storage area, among other things, for all users.
We where investigating S3QL replacements during development of the upgrade and the current solution we where going to evaluate where Rclone in combination with restic which seems like a potent replacement with an active vibrant development community.
Please let us know how you proceed with your own setup and how it works out!
And with all that said i would like to point out that we actually have the complete Kinguard software stack running on, in principle, any device capable of running Debian Bullseye. Virtual machines, Raspberry PI and other single board computers. Our repositories currently support Debian Bullseye on X86_64, 32 and 64 bit Arm.
And if anyone would be interested in helping out with development of this we just might be able to produce a new software release. There is a lot that never have gotten released. I would gladly help out with any spare time, which unfortunately is not a lot.
All the Best!
/Tor
Re: Successor of Keep
Hi Tor,
I wish I had the skills necessary to work on improving Keep, but I am too rusty when it comes to system development and just setting up the development environment is beyond me.
I am still using the Keep for synchronizing my files on 5+ devices. I am the only primary user. I share some of the files with other persons, but all the data on the Keep belongs to me. The local backup solution does not work anymore on the Keep due to some hardware problem with the USB connection. I will continue to use the Keep for synchronization of files until I feel it is too vulnerable due to lack of updates. The plan is to replace it with a Raspberry PI with Ubuntu and standard Nextcloud server.
For backup I have a separate Raspberry Pi 3B and an external USB disk on which I have installed Ubuntu and the file system btrfs. I have installed the NextCloud client and use the nexctcloudcmd command to sync the backup server with Keep once daily. Once the sync is done, I clone the data with a read-only “btrfs subvolume snapshot -r” command. I thereby have a copy of the data on a separate machine and can restore to any date. The clone does not take up any additional space, it is only files that have been added or changed that take up space.
I have not implemented any automatic clean-up of old backups. I think I manually will go in a couple of times per year and erase selected daily backups. There is no user-friendly way to restore files. I will need to manually copy files from the backup-server in order to restore files.
I have created a dedicated account on the Keep server for the backups. This account has read-only access rights to the files I want to back up. The backup server can therefore not easily be used to modify the original data on Keep in case of a security breach. If the Keep server is compromised, the backups should not be in danger.
--Harald
I wish I had the skills necessary to work on improving Keep, but I am too rusty when it comes to system development and just setting up the development environment is beyond me.
I am still using the Keep for synchronizing my files on 5+ devices. I am the only primary user. I share some of the files with other persons, but all the data on the Keep belongs to me. The local backup solution does not work anymore on the Keep due to some hardware problem with the USB connection. I will continue to use the Keep for synchronization of files until I feel it is too vulnerable due to lack of updates. The plan is to replace it with a Raspberry PI with Ubuntu and standard Nextcloud server.
For backup I have a separate Raspberry Pi 3B and an external USB disk on which I have installed Ubuntu and the file system btrfs. I have installed the NextCloud client and use the nexctcloudcmd command to sync the backup server with Keep once daily. Once the sync is done, I clone the data with a read-only “btrfs subvolume snapshot -r” command. I thereby have a copy of the data on a separate machine and can restore to any date. The clone does not take up any additional space, it is only files that have been added or changed that take up space.
I have not implemented any automatic clean-up of old backups. I think I manually will go in a couple of times per year and erase selected daily backups. There is no user-friendly way to restore files. I will need to manually copy files from the backup-server in order to restore files.
I have created a dedicated account on the Keep server for the backups. This account has read-only access rights to the files I want to back up. The backup server can therefore not easily be used to modify the original data on Keep in case of a security breach. If the Keep server is compromised, the backups should not be in danger.
--Harald