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Hardware Projects

Protecting Leisure Batteries and Smartifying Campervans

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalise a purchase. Learn more.

Three icons: battery on phone, bolt, and car battery in white on a blurry background of some electronics from my van
Protect your batteries!

This post is slightly different from the usual, as it's all to do with my campervan. As some of you might know, I enjoy camping and have converted a Renault Trafic into my very own campervan, equipped with all the mod-cons one might expect when camping in luxury.

One of the downsides to this luxury is that it all uses a lot of power... the lights draw about 10W all in, the inverter sips around 30W just at idle, and don't even get me started talking about the diesel heater. All this power has to come from somewhere, and for me, it's a leisure battery.

Building an Offsite Backup NAS

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalise a purchase. Learn more.

Hard drive on fire spurting images
Making sure that failures like these don't cause total data loss (AI generated image)

You've likely heard of the 3-2-1 rule for backups. If not, it's really simple:

  • You want 3 copies of your data,
  • of these copies, 2 on different mediums (e.g., HDD/tape),
  • and finally there should be 1 offsite copy.

When forming your backup plan, you should consider each of these requirements, and formulate a plan for how you'll fulfill them. You also want to consider the type of data you'll be storing, how frequently it'll be accessed, and whether the data is truly irreplaceable, or something that can be re-downloaded or imported from another medium.

In this article, I'll be explaining my 3-2-1 backup solution, including the architecture, costs, and overall performance.