My backup device (a 2TB hard drive in a USB 3 enclosure) has filled up and I need to either supplement it, or replace it with something bigger. What does LQ recommend?

It's quite likely that I'll only ever use it with Linux, although Windows and Mac compatibility are nice to have.

You can partition USB drives but since you say you want it only for backups and may want it to do other platforms I'd suggest looking at a personal NAS device.

I see a comparison of those at:
https://www.techradar.com/news/the-1...vices-reviewed

We use NAS at a corporate level here and they do de-duplication so multiple backups take less space than the original data. I don't see dedupe mentioned in the above review. I do see various links that talk about doing open source deduplication on other storage. Commercial dedupe appliances like those we use here are probably cost prohibitive for home use but you could explore the open source methods if interested.

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Either a higher capacity drive in the enclosure you have, or NAS.

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I use a Raspberry Pi3, running Raspbian OS, and UrBackup software as my backup server. The Pi is headless - I access it via ssh, but can use VNC too if I need GUI for some reason (never do need it though). That is hooked to an external WD 4Tb red drive formatted EXT4 in an all metal fan-cooled USB enclosure (fan is turned off because drive runs ice-cold without it). The Pi boots off of the external drive too, so no issues that some have with extended use of microSD cards for the OS. I have UrBackup clients installed on several Linux boxes and several Windows boxes. Most are local, but one Linux box is remote.

This has been a very solid and reliable solution for me. Cheap too: The Pi with case and power brick is about $50, the 4Tb drive was in the neighborhood of $110 IIRC, and the enclosure was something like $25. Less than $200 for the entire setup, and that's using a good WD red drive and not the cheaper drives that are usually put into external enclosures and NAS that you buy pre-built. Trivial software setup to get this all running. UrBackup is free too. Has a nice web-based interface (it's own built-in webserver, and everything can be done via this web interface).

Set and forget operation. Just keeps chugging along unattended doing both image and file backups as scheduled (images only supported on Windows though). Backups are stored in standard OS fashion. i.e., If UrBackup were to go defunct and all traces of it disappeared, your backups are still accessible and usable with just standard OS commands. That is a fantastic feature. I highly recommend this setup. Only real downside is the Pi it runs on. I don't consider it a downside personally. But the Pi has only USB 2.0 ports, so disk access is not as fast as it could be. But I don't care if my backup takes 20 minutes when it would have taken 5, since it's happening at 3:00am when I'm asleep. I don't need super speed, so the Pi is the perfect hardware to host this on IMHO.

https://www.urbackup.org/

Before I make a recommendation, I am wondering what procedure you are using for your backups? I'm curious because you say your backup target has run out of space and, with apologies, I'm wondering whether you are duplicating data in your backups.

I use rsync -a for my backups.

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