Hi,

I am looking into the possibility of using an old PC for backup purposes. About 2Ghz CPU and 1GB RAM.

It has a few hard drives in it that I would like to have these appear as a single virtual disk (JBOD, not RAID).

I would also like to run the PC headless.

I will only be using the machine for backups, so it will literally be a case of turning the PC on once a week, backing up any new files, and then switching it off again.

What distro is best used for something like this?

Thanks

Anything without a GUI - doesn't take much to run ssh and rsync.
I use Arch on my Raspberry pi, but it might not suit everyone.

Running a bunch of disks as a single filesystem would be RAID 0. It's ok for data you don't care about, such as a cache, but any error on any of the disks in the RAID array will take down the whole array and lose all that data.

That said, I second the recommendation of anything that has ssh and rsync. Devuan is another distro to look at.

No necessarily - look at LVM.
But RAID (on LVM) make more sense IMHO. Current LVM offers failure policy so it can automatically repair a failed array if you have spares configured.

'bout time this functionality was available.

Thanks for your help.

I would say, upfront, that I am very much a beginner to Linux (though hoping to change that as quickly as I can) - apologies in advance for anything I might say that seems a bit foolish.

I was under the impression that JBOD was different to Raid. Ideally, I want to combine all the hard drives into a single drivepool.

When you put a file in the drivepool, the software decides which hard drive to use (based upon %, temperature, I/O etc.) and puts the whole file on that hard drive. That way, if one of the hard drives fails, the files on all the remaining hard drives remain fully intact.

Based upon this page:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SnapRAID

a "FUSE-based filesystems is the best option. (e.g. MHDDFS, MergerFS, unionfs-fuse)". Does anyone have any experience of any of these programs?

Thank you for recommending Devuan - have never heard of this but shall see what it offers.

Is avoiding a GUI going to be a major problem for a Linux beginner?

Probably not. The shell is a UI that has been refined and polished for decades so once it gets a little familiar it will really grow on you. It's also orders of magnitude more powerful and flexible than any GUI, so there is a lot of room to grow. As a bonus anything you do via the shell can be automated later if you decide there is a need.

If your network card supports it, you might look at Wake-on-LAN to turn on your computer without needing physical intervention. Not only does that save a little effort, it means that turning on and off can be automated.

To clarify:
I recommended no GUI as it isn't necessary for the task - especially on low hardware. However I do have (32-bit) Fedora with gnome3 desktop running fine (not fast) on a Pentium III with 1 Gig RAM. So if you can bear the some slowness you should be fine to install almost anything.

Edit: by "slowness" I mean perceived slowness in the GUI interface, not slowness that would affect the backup process.