Changing user IDs did not work properly, I rolled that back.

It should work fine so you must have done something wrong. How did you change the user IDs?

Aren’t you scared about loosing your data?

No. I still have files from 1991. I’ve got files that have migrated from floppy disk to hard drive to QIC-80 tape to PD (Phase Change) optical disk to CD-RW to DVD+RW and now back to hard drives.

What if I get a ransomwarei don’t realize and all my backups get encrypted too?

Then you need to detect the ransomware before you backup. I use rsync --dry-run and look at what WOULD change before I run it for real. If I see thousands of files change that I did not expect then I would not run the backup and investigate what changed before running the rsync command for real.

Or if the backups are corrupted

I have 3 copies of my data. Local file server, local backup, remote file server.

I also run rsnapshot on /home every hour to another drive in the machine. I also run snapraid sync to dual parity drives in the system once a day.

I generate and compare stored file checksums twice a year across all 3 copies to detect any corruption. Over 300TB I have about 1 failed checksum every 2 years.

and my disks breaks?

If one of my disks breaks I buy a new one and restore from backups.

But also I’m afraid about cloud

I don’t use any cloud services because I don’t trust them.

Anything eSATA is probably over 10 years old now.

If it is an enclosure with just 1 hard drive then it will probably work fine. If you are looking at an eSATA enclosure with multiple hard drives then it probably has a SATA port multiplier inside. SATA port multipliers require specific port multiplier support from the main SATA controller in your PC. As far as I know none of the Intel or AMD SATA controllers on a motherboard support port multipliers. You have to use another PCIE SATA card with support for that. My experience with them 10 years ago is that they are all flaky and will suffer from random disconnects and dropouts.

USB3 is far more popular now and basically killed eSATA. USB can also have problems with random disconnects.

How many drives do you need in the external enclosure? Commerically available SAS enclosures are expensive. If you have an old PC case and power supply you can make that into a SAS enclosure with a few cables and adapters

Get an LSI SAS HBA “8e” card like this

https://www.ebay.com/itm/163534822734?epid=28034148027&hash=item26136f5d4e:g:5sEAAOSwdwlcX2E3

A couple SFF-8088 to 4X SATA cables

https://www.amazon.com/Female-3-3FTCable-Controller-Target-Backplane/dp/B08NGGPPCY/

A power supply jumper like this

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0756WFMNF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I’ve got 8 drives in an old PC case like this and it works great with no disconnects ever.

Does your server use a server motherboard? Or are you reusing a desktop style motherboard as a server?

A lot of server motherboards support IPMI which allows access over the network to change BIOS / UEFI settings and install the OS remotely and stuff like that.

You could get a case like these

https://www.newegg.com/black-supermicro-cse-512l-200b/p/N82E16811152222

https://www.newegg.com/istarusa-d118itx-30/p/N82E16811165293

But it may be difficult to securely mount the hard drives. You might need to 3D print some brackets to align with the motherboard mounting holes. Then if you have an SFF-8088 SAS port on the back of your main box use a cable like this or a variant of it and thread it through a hole in the new case.

https://www.amazon.com/Mini-SAS-SFF-8088-SFF-8482-Power-Cable/dp/B08NGJ7F5K/?th=1

Honestly you are really limited with 1U and not a full length rack. In the long run it would probably be cheaper to replace the rack if your storage is going to continue to grow.

Honestly you bought the wrong card for internal SAS hard drives. You can make it work with some adapters but it is going to get messy.

As you have discovered the SFF-8088 port is on the back of the card for connecting an external box of drives. You can use an SFF-8088 to 4X SATA cable like this and loop the cable from outside your case back inside.

https://www.amazon.com/CableCreation-SFF-8088-Female-Controller-Backplane/dp/B013G4EX9K/

But this won’t work with your SAS hard drive. That cable is for SATA hard drives and SAS drives have an extra bit of plastic to prevent connecting a SATA cable.

https://imgur.com/a/9zieTy8

You can use this SFF-8088 to SAS cable and loop it from the back of your case to the inside but you see it requires a bunch of Molex connectors to provide power for the drives. If you had that many free Molex connectors then buy this cable.

https://www.amazon.com/Mini-SAS-SFF-8088-SFF-8482-Power-Cable/dp/B08NGJ7F5K

What you really should have bought is an LSI SAS HBA “8i” or “16i” card that have SFF-8087 ports designed for internal use. Then you can use this cable with connectors to the SAS data ports on the hard drive and then uses SATA power connectors to power the SAS hard drives.

https://www.amazon.com/AdcAudx-Mini-SAS-SAS-Cable-Internal-SATA-Power/dp/B09Q33VV5V/

You could get a bracket like this and an 8088 to 8088 cable to connect outside your computer and then it would effectively give you an SFF-8087 port. Then you could use either of the SFF-8087 to 4X SATA or 4X SAS cables.

https://www.amazon.com/CableDeconn-SFF-8088-SFF-8087-Adapter-Bracket/dp/B00PRXOQFA/

https://www.amazon.com/CableCreation-External-26pin-SFF-8088-Cable/dp/B013G4F3A8/

All of the cables above are normal forward breakout cables. When you read the manual and it says that the 4 internal SATA ports support SAS drives it is technically true but how do you connect them? The people who would use that feature are usually connecting to a SAS backplane with an SFF-8087 or other type of SAS port. So they would use a reverse breakout cable but you don’t have a backplane so forget about that.

copy / paste of my previous post

Silent bit rot where a bit flips but there is no hardware is extremely rare. My stats say once a year on 300TB of data. Some statistics major can correct me but if someone has 1TB of data then they should see a single bit flip in 300 years so maybe their great great great grandchildren will see it and report back to them in a time machine.

All of my data is on ordinary ext4 hard drives. I buy all my drives in groups of 3. I have my local file server, local backup, and remote backup. I have 2 drives in the local file server dedicated for snapraid parity and run “snapraid sync” every night.

https://www.snapraid.it

Snapraid has a data scrub feature. I run that once every 6 months to verify that my primary copy of my data in my file server is still correct.

Then I run cshatag on every file when generates SHA256 checksums and stores them as ext4 extended attribute metadata. It compares the stored checksum and stored timestamp and if any file has changed but the timestamp wasn’t edited it reports it as corrupt.

https://github.com/rfjakob/cshatag

Then I use rsync -RHXva when I make my backups via rsync of all my media drives. This data is almost never modifed, just new files are added. The -X option is to also copy over the extended attribute metadata. Then I run the same cshatag file on the local backup and remote backup server. This takes about 1 day to run. On literally 90 million files across 300TB it finds a single file about once a year that has been silently corrupted. I have 2 other copies that match each other so I overwrite the bad file with one of the good copies.

I only run rsnapshot on /home because that is where my frequently changing files are. The other 99% of my data is maybe “write only” so I just use rsync from the main file server to the two backups. Before I run rsync for real I use rsync --dry-run to show what WOULD change but it doesn’t do anything. If I see the files I expect to be written then I run it for real. If I were to see thousands of files that would be changed I would stop and investigate. Was this a cryptolocker virus that updated thousands of files?

As for backing up the operating system I have the /etc and /root account backed up every hour through rsnapshot along with /home

I’m not running a business. I can reinstall Linux in 15 minutes on a new SSD and copy over the handful of files I need from the /etc backup