I’ve found the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ makes an excellent Terraria server for my local network. I haven’t stress tested it with a lot of players, but it does really well so far for my purposes.

One thing that was very lacking, though, was an easy way to back up the save. It can sit on the SD card, but if anything happens to that, I want all the construction in the game world to be safe. On a Windows machine, I’d just have the save game live in my Dropbox folder and point the server to that. There’s just one problem: there’s no real Dropbox client for the Pi.

I could also manually back it up, which I did for a while when I remembered. Now there’s a much better way, because I made one: dropbox-autoupload is a Node package that will watch a list of files I specify and upload them to a folder in my Dropbox when they change. I have it run when the Pi starts up, along with the Terraria server, and all is well. Plus, now it’s on NPM, so you can use it too!