Hi All

When i built my new unraid server to replace the freenas box, i built it with new drives and ran them side by side for a bit. ive still got the old drives, plus a bunch of hardware, so i was thinking of building a second unraid for backup. both to backup the stuff thats on there, but also to switch over to, should i have any issues with the main unraid server.

Ive googled how to do the actual file copying bit and it looks like there are some guides to follow so thats cool. I'm a linux noob really, but i get what i need to get done by reading tutorials etc.

I was originally thinking of using a reasonably big SSD cache drive, to speed up the backup process * (i'll come back to this) and try and semi automate the process by using WOL to boot the backup drive, and having it copy the files over, then shutdown once done. This however doesnt give time to do the "mover" to move the data from the cache to the array. If i do both of those processes at once, then there would be no benefit to using the cache in the first place.

*since the data is coming from the mechanical HDDs from the array anyway, is there much to be gained from having the SSD as a cache?

It seems easier to just skip the cache on the backup unraid?

For those that do this, what do you do?

Thanks

11 minutes ago, champ222 said:

It seems easier to just skip the cache on the backup unraid?

No need for the cache as you determined

11 minutes ago, champ222 said:

For those that do this, what do you do?

I have an rsync script that runs unattended from User Scripts once a week (could be as often as you like) to backup from main Unraid server to the backup server. It does the following:

1 - power on backup server (this is possible because it has IPMI). Before I had a board with IPMI, it was just asleep and the script woke it up via etherwake commands. Possible also to use a smart power switch I suppose

2 - waits until backup server is up and array started

3 - copies new or modified files from disk to disk. Backup server has the same number of HDDs of the same size as source server. Before it was like this, the script copied from share to share.

4 - emails me the results of the backup with a disk to disk summary of backup (files, overall amount of data copied, time to completion, etc.)

5 - powers down backup server until next backup is needed

Script has been running unattended for about 4 years now.

Every once in a while, I run a modified version of the script that deletes files from the backup server that no longer exist on the source server. I don't do this with backup script so I can recover "accidentally" deleted files on the source server since there is a good chance they are still on the backup server. Had to do this once when my wife accidentally deleted a full folder of photos and was in panic mode :)

Edited January 18Jan 18 by Hoopster

Thanks. That sounds like the perfect solution. I'll carry on and build the backup system and see if can figure out how to setup something similar.