FreeBSD Network Backup Thing from Scrap

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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 USB is *much* better on USB than with the crappy SD reader of the RPi1. 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
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