WebDAV vs S3 vs SFTP

I went down some of these roads. My use case is I wanted to slap a raspberry pi to a usb hard drive and be able to drop it off at a friends house for low energy consumption mini-server. That way I isolated my backups from his hardware.

Anyway, minio is easy to get up and running but if you want to make it auto-start and/or use https it takes a bit more effort but honestly not that much. I’ve been using minio on my raspberry pi for a few weeks now and so far I’m happy as a clam with it. I’m running it on a raspberry pi 1 B+ model and using 50 mb block size I see the cpu spike to 100% for about 20 seconds per block on my local lan than it drops down 5% again for 30 seconds or more before it cranks up again.

I’m running my backups on an older Atom machine with only 2 GB of RAM and even on the local network the pi+minio are not the bottleneck of running backups. That leads me to believe that standard internet transfer rates are going to my biggest limiting factor in that regard.

It is true that Minio does one thing and one thing well. It isn’t a great dropbox replacement though you could use it for that. My only goal was for a backup target. I made different buckets for each backup task.

I’m running it on Raspberry Pi 1 B+ and DietPi distro. DietPi is a striped down version of raspbian that has some really nice menu system/tools that make it easy to get it up and running. One thing it has is a place to install applications with a proverbial one click and optimized for DietPi. I recently contributed code to make Minio a one click install as well as the code to make it easy to add an SSL cert to minio. All automatically – including configuration and autostart. It isn’t in the distro yet but hopefully it will be sooner than later. Added Minio Software by techdabbler · Pull Request #1152 · Fourdee/DietPi · GitHub

So I think minio is pretty easy to maintain and if the code gets merged into the distro then it will be even easier. I’d say a complete OS / applicataion front end rebuild (assuming the data drive is fine) would take me about 30 minutes tops?

On the WebDAV side I went down the road of Seafile on docker but could never get WebDAV to work easily so I bailed (but oh was it pretty!). The other WebDAV backend that was a lead contender for me before I found minio is something called fuguhub. It is more like NextCloud though not as pretty but small, lightweight, and easy to install. There is a box plugin that makes permissions easier as well.

Hope some/any of that helps.

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