FreeBSD Network Backup Thing from Scrap

This document shows how to setup a dedicated backup machine for LAN use, made from bit and pieces most people don't care about these days: a Raspberry Pi 1, a 32MB SD Card, and a 2GB USB key. For the software, we will use FreeBSD and BorgBackup.

Prepare the OS

Why waste a 8GB or 16GB fancy SD Card when you probably have some old SD and USB sticks lying around? Also reading performances on the RPi1 is much better on USB than with the crappy SD reader. Finally, FreeBSD on the RPi1 works great, and very light on resources which is a plus given the limitation of the RPi CPU and RAM.

What needs to be done in a nutshell is to have the mandatory MS-DOS /boot partition on the 32MB SD card and have the rest of the filesystem on the USB stick.

• Get the FreeBSD RPi1 image (update to latest RPI-B image)

wget https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/arm/armv6/ISO-IMAGES/11.2/FreeBSD-11.2-RELEASE-arm-armv6-RPI-B.img.xz

• Plug USB stick and copy the FreeBSD image to it (adjust /dev/sdX)

xzcat FreeBSD-11.2-RELEASE-arm-armv6-RPI-B.img.xz | sudo dd bs=1M of=/dev/sdX status=progress

• Plug the 32MB sdcard and create a W95 FAT32 partition with fdisk or something (Hex code b) then format it:

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX1