Personal File Server on Raspberry Pi

Jan 20, 19

Synopsis

I recently completed setup of my personal file server running on raspberry pi. For beginners, NextCloud is a personal, free alternative to services such as icloud or dropbox. I will walk you through the steps involved in this setup and my overall experience with this tool.

Raspberry Setup

Introduction

Hardware Requirement

Software Requirement

Raspberry Setup - Follow these instructions to setup Raspberry Pi

Setup

We need to ensure that the external harddrive is always mounted to the same folder location under /mnt Firstly, we need to gather the UUID of the external hard drive. Run following command to output this information

lsblk --fs

Output

sda
+-sda1      ntfs     easystore E81EB2EA1EB2B0C4                     /mnt/hd_homesink
sdb
+-sdb1      ntfs     easystore DA88A08288A05F2F                     /mnt/hd_nextcloud

Make a note of the UUID and make an entry into the /etc/fstab as follows. This will ensure that everytime the raspi is booted it will mount in the same location

File: Make you following entry in /etc/fstab

UUID=E81EB2EA1EB2B0C4 /mnt/hd_homesink ntfs async,big_writes,noatime,nodiratime,nofail,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=007 0 0

UUID=DA88A08288A05F2F /mnt/hd_nextcloud ntfs async,big_writes,noatime,nodiratime,nofail,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=007 0 0

Create this shell script to backup the content from one external drive to another File: nextcloud_backup.sh

rsync -aPv /mnt/hd_nextcloud/data /mnt/hd_homesink/nextcloud_backup/

File: system_backup.sh

#!/bin/bash
#
# Automate Raspberry Pi Backups
#
# Kristofer Källsbo 2017 www.hackviking.com
#
# Usage: system_backup.sh {path} {days of retention}
#
# Below you can set the default values if no command line args are sent.
# The script will name the backup files {$HOSTNAME}.{YYYYmmdd}.img
# When the script deletes backups older then the specified retention
# it will only delete files with it's own $HOSTNAME.
#

# Declare vars and set standard values
backup_path=/mnt/hd_homesink/pi1
retention_days=1

# Check that we are root!
if [[ ! $(whoami) =~ "root" ]]; then
echo ""
echo "**********************************"
echo "*** This needs to run as root! ***"
echo "**********************************"
echo ""
exit
fi

# Check to see if we got command line args
if [ ! -z $1 ]; then
   backup_path=$1
fi

if [ ! -z $2 ]; then
   retention_days=$2
fi

# Create trigger to force file system consistency check if image is restored
touch /boot/forcefsck

# Perform backup
dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=$backup_path/$HOSTNAME.$(date +%Y%m%d).img bs=1M

# Remove fsck trigger
rm /boot/forcefsck

# Delete old backups
find $backup_path/$HOSTNAME.*.img -mtime +$retention_days -type f -delete