Late June 2026 home server updates
Added Immich and copyparty, though copyparty is probably not correctly configured
Adding a backup target
I have a Raspberry Pi 4B with 4GB of RAM lying aroun collecting dust and would like to repurpose it as a backup target. I plan to attach an external SSD via one of the USB 3 ports.
First, I need to remove that external SSD from my existing home server. First remove the corresponding backup target from Backrest. Then remove the corresponding entry from fstab so the operating system does not try to mount this external SSD on startup.
cp /etc/fstab ~/fstab
cp ~/fstab ~/fstab.bak
# edit ~/fstab and remove the appropriate entry
sudo cp ~/fstab /etc/fstab
# validate by mounting everything
sudo mount -a
sudo reboot
Note the entry we removed:
# External drive
UUID=<REDACTED> /mnt/backup btrfs defaults 0 0
After reboot, check that the external SSD is not automatically mounted with
lsblk. I also checked that my existing services get back up successfully. We
are done with the main home server.
Now onto the Raspberry Pi. Connect the external SSD to the Pi and inspect with
lsblk. I’ve mounted this external SSD before, and it seemed like Raspberry Pi
OS automatically mounted it when attached, so I needed to unmount it with
sudo umount /dev/<sdX>, then mount it back to the desired location with
sudo mount /dev/<sdX> /mnt/backup. After the mount succeeds, I can inspect
the content:
restic -r /mnt/backup/Restic check
Now we will add the deleted fstab entry back. Use lsblk -f to show the UUID
of the device, which should be the same as what was removed earlier.