My last post detailed all the hardware I am running, so this post will list all the software that I run in VM's and containers. All of the following are virtual machines running on top of ESXi 7.0 U3 on three hosts. All containers are run within Virtual Machines.

Last time I posted a full writeup on my lab (The before before this) there was a lot of questions on what exactly I was running at home. So here is a full writeup on everything I am running, and how you can run it too

  • DataproletEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Why do you run Borg in a dedicated VM that you have to power on and off manually?

    • @GiantPossumOP
      3•1 year ago

      So powering on and powering off will eventually be handled by a Powershell script I use to kick of the backups (More than just Borg goes into my offsite/offline backups) and the reason it gets powered off is that the external drive I connect to my desktop computer gets shared out, and sometimes Windows mixes the drive letters up, or the Share permissions get out of whack. I find that if the VM is on when its screwed up, Debian really doesn’t like the mount and ends up causing some weird issues. So if I just leave it off until I have my ducks in a row with the backup drive, it all works perfectly. I guess there is also no point it in sitting there powered on 24/7, when I only do the backups monthly too

      As for why its a dedicated VM, a few years ago I noticed I was constantly moving backup software, trying other solutions etc, which just doesn’t work. If you change backup software every 6 months, you don’t really have any real long term backups. So I decided Borg and the VM its installed on needs to stay very stable, so I settled on just throwing it in own VM. This way I never need to move it, migrate it, etc. Its always just there and it works