While reading many of the blogs and posts here about self hosting, I notice that self hosters spend a lot of time searching for and migrating between VPS or backup hosting. Being a cheapskate, I have a raspberry pi with a large disk attached and leave it at a relative’s house. I’ll rsync my backup drive to it nightly. The problem is when something happens, I have to walk them through a reboot or do troubleshooting over the phone or worse, wait until a holiday when we all meet.
What would a solution look like for a bunch of random tech nerds who happen to live near each other to cross host each other’s offsite backups? How would you secure it, support it or make it resilient to bad actors? Do you think it could work? What are the drawbacks?
I have exactly the setup you described, a Raspberry Pi with an 8 TB SSD parked at a friend of mine. It connects to my network via Wireguard automatically and just sits there until one of my hosts running Duplicati starts to sync the encrypted backups to it.
Has been running for 2 years now with no issues.