Worth reviving a 755 for PBS?

[inxsible]

I have an existing Dell Optiplex 755 SFF

1. Core2Duo E8200
2. 8GB DDR2 RAM
3. Intel NIC
4. 80GB HDD

This machine was serving as my Archlinux desktop for over a decade but recently the PSU conked out. I borrowed a PSU from a friend and made sure everything else is working. Is it worth spending $20 to get a PSU from ebay and have PBS run on it -- assuming I can put in a 500GB or 1TB HDD in it ?

I checked the PBS requirements -- and I am ok on the RAM, but at minimum for CPU cores. But again, I already have this machine and it's in a home environment where uptime is not of huge concern.

 

[leesteken]

I'm running PBS on an old AMD AthlonX2 with 8GB DDR2 and it works good enough for second/longer-term backups. I sync from the main one (which runs as a container on Proxmox) using an second-hand Intel 1Gbps in the only PCIe-slot inside the machine.The NIC on the motherboard (which is an old nForce2) is too slow with only 100Mbps. I use a few second-hand 1TB drives in a ZFS-mirror. Garbage collection (or any non-sequential work-load) is slow but I only run it only once a year or so. I installed PBS on Debian with a LXCE desktop that allows me to manage the PBS via its web GUI.

 

[Dunuin]

Should be powerfull enough...the question is more the power efficiency. I don't know what you pay per kWh but here even a 50W machine running 24/7 would cost 147€ per year.

 

[inxsible]

Thanks @avw & @Dunuin for your replies.

We pay around 7 cents per kWh. But does the PBS machine need to run 24/7? Can you set it up so that you can wake it up and on boot it would create backups and then we can shut it down. If I do this, say, weekly, then only 1 weeks "changes" are at risk which is something I can live with as my actual data resides on the NAS PBS would only be backing up the LXC & VM OSes.

 

[leesteken]

The PBS does not "make the backup", it is PVE that makes backups to the PBS. But yes, in principle you could synchronize the timing of the backup with booting the PBS.

 

[inxsible]

Great. Thanks. I will start setting it up -- but first off to ebay for the PSU.

 

[Dunuin]

But as far as I know PBS can't hibernate nor is there any build in function to support scheduled boot/shutdown so you would need to script that somehow yourself using cron and WoL/IPMI oder something similar.

We pay around 7 cents per kWh.

I really need to emigrate...we pay here 0.38 $ per KWh.