Should I leave hot backup computer on 24x7?

WalterDnes

I like to operate with two desktop PCs (linux, but that’s irrelevant). The older one is always the “main” PC, and the newer one is the “hot backup”. My plan is to “rsync” my home directory to the hot backup daily, so it can take over immediately in case of catastrophic failure on the main unit. The hot backup becomes the main unit and I hope it can hold out for two weeks until a new hot backup arrives (I do have external USB backup drives.) And of course OS system updates monthly.

Given that the hot backup machine will only be used for a few minutes most days for home directory updates, should I leave it on 24×7 or power on and off daily? Additional info: the hot backup’s “hard drive” is NVME SSD; no “spinning rust”.

Guy54435

WalterDnes Maybe use a little Wake-on-LAN magic?

real_aurgathor

No.

Two big reasons:

power usage
increased vulnerability to damage caused by fast power surges

OzarkEdge

WalterDnes Given that the hot backup machine will only be used for a few minutes most days for home directory updates, should I leave it on 24×7 or power on and off daily? Additional info: the hot backup’s “hard drive” is NVME SSD; no “spinning rust”.

Leave it ON or stop calling it hot.

WalterDnes

OzarkEdge Leave it ON or stop calling it hot.

The main daily change on my desktop is downloading+reading email. rsync-ing after email is “close enough” to “hot backup”.

InternetJeff

WalterDnes

WalterDnes I like to operate with two desktop PCs (linux, but that’s irrelevant). The older one is always the “main” PC, and the newer one is the “hot backup”. My plan is to “rsync” my home directory to the hot backup daily, so it can take over immediately in case of catastrophic failure on the main unit. The hot backup becomes the main unit and I hope it can hold out for two weeks until a new hot backup arrives (I do have external USB backup drives.) And of course OS system updates monthly.

That’s actually not a bad strategy and something I used to do for years without issue before I got a couple Synology NAS devices to automatically keep my PCs backed up. I would recommend you keep everything on an UPS.

real_aurgathor

WalterDnes The main daily change on my desktop is downloading+reading email. rsync-ing after email is “close enough” to “hot backup”.

Hot spares are normally used when you’re doing something really important, requiring a 100% uptime and availability. For example, if you had an online store that can accept credit cards – you want to make sure that it’s up all the time.

But for the aforementioned use a daily backup should be more than enough, unless there are some known, preexisting issues with reliability.

WalterDnes

Guy54435 Maybe use a little Wake-on-LAN magic?

Wake-on-LAN is actually very convenient, since the second PC is in another room (50 ft of ethernet cable). I finally figured out that I need to disable “deep sleep” in the target machine’s BIOS for Wake-on-LAN to work.

Guy54435

WalterDnes Hopefully you can get it to work how you want it to.

WalterDnes

Guy54435

It works…

Step 1) Script that wakes up remote machine

#!/bin/bash
wakeonlan <target_machine_NIC_UUID>

Step 2) Wait 30 seconds for bootup

Step 3) Run rsync script

Step 4) Script to poweroff remote machine

#!/bin/bash
ssh root@dev3 /sbin/poweroff

Guy54435

WalterDnes Glad it worked with desired endgame, Probably ought to baby sit it closely for a week or so and make sure everything is playing nice.

WalterDnes

Guy54435
It helps that rsync allows to specify a log file, so I know exactly what got backed up.