Guysoft's Weblog

BackupFriend – Self-hosted backup to your RaspberryPi with a history and UI! July 19, 2021

Hey all,
I am releasing today something I’ve been working on the past year. It stared with a friend that had a requirement to do off-site backups of his work for his insurance, but BackupFriend has became a full blown backup solution.
The idea is you get a RaspberryPi and plug a harddrive to it, put it at your friends, family or just in your house and backup up to it using a desktop client that should have the feel like Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. You also get history! The RaspberryPi can also be changed to a remote server (instructions here). This guide focuses on self-hosted instructions, because I think its strange all backup solutions out there require you to pay rent for your own data.
Using a 4TB drive for under $100 and a Pi, you can get much more storage which is not ephemeral.
The desktop client has been tested on both Linux, MacOS and Windows.

Also, many thanks to Pull Request Community that featured BackupFriend as a project to work on, that helped get a few PRs on-board.

What you will need

1. A Raspberry Pi, preferably 4B because of the USB3
   • Note: Raspsberrypi can be replaced with a server (instructions here).
2. A home network with a computer running Linux, MacOS or Windows, which you will be backing up from
3. An external hard drive that can connect to the Pi (I use a 4TB WD My Passport drive, you can also just use a thumb drive for testing).

How to install on a Pi