Help With Backing Up Server (6.5.3)

[warmarshall2nd]

Good Evening, All:

 

Before I begin, I want to thank you for your patience...

 

I joined the unRaid community a couple months ago and have been slowly setting up my first NAS/media server/data repository.  A bit of background.  I have NO experience with coding or using linux, so there is a lot of stuff on the forums that is Greek to me...but once I get past that barrier, I am usually golden.

 

I currently manually back all my critical data from my server up manually every week to a large hotswappable hard drive connected to my main system (running Windows 10).

 

What I want to do is set up an automatic back up of this data.  For the time being, I am willing to just have it back up to an external every so often, but I want to set up a second server in my home as a back-up server that would only be on occasionally to receive updates from the main repository.  I have found other people that do this in the forums, but as I said, I do not have a clue what I am looking at when I see the listed code.

 

Would anyone be able to explain to me, as an unRaid dummy, or direct me to the information I need to sift through to understand how to accomplish this?

 

Again, I am most grateful for any assistance you all may be able to provide, as well as your patience.  If I need to provide any more information, let me know!

 

 

[tmoran000]

I went through something like this when I first set mine up. I wanted a system to auto back up folders that I pick and back them up at a location I choose and I wanted it to keep 1 week of changes before over writing the oldest one. The way I found to so this was running a windows vm and using Acronis Backup software. Works perfectrly. I could not find docker software or anything to back up with 

[warmarshall2nd]

Thanks for the response.

So here's another stupid question.  I spent today reading through more of the topics....what is rsync, and where can I get it?

 

Thanks guys!

[wgstarks]

From Wikipedia-

rsync is a utility for efficiently transferring and synchronizing files across computer systems, by checking the timestamp and size of files.^[3] It is commonly found on Unix-like systems and functions as both a file synchronization and file transfer program. The rsync algorithm is a type of delta encoding, and is used for minimizing network usage. Zlib may be used for additional compression,^[3] and SSH or stunnel can be used for data security.

 

IIRC it’s included in the Linux kernel.

[warmarshall2nd]

Unless I'm supposed to just download it....In which case I feel really foolish...

[wgstarks]

Just now, warmarshall2nd said:

Unless I'm supposed to just download it....In which case I feel really foolish...

It’s a command line utility. Pretty sure you already have it.

[warmarshall2nd]

54 minutes ago, wgstarks said:

From Wikipedia-

rsync is a utility for efficiently transferring and synchronizing files across computer systems, by checking the timestamp and size of files.^[3] It is commonly found on Unix-like systems and functions as both a file synchronization and file transfer program. The rsync algorithm is a type of delta encoding, and is used for minimizing network usage. Zlib may be used for additional compression,^[3] and SSH or stunnel can be used for data security.

 

IIRC it’s included in the Linux kernel.

 

Welp, you lost me...  I'm on rsync's website.  And I found this thread:

 

Guess I'm just trying to still figure this out.  Man... Linux can make me feel stupid.

[warmarshall2nd]

Would you look at that...Okay so I'm trying to familiarize myself with rsync now...  Per tutorials (because that's all I have to go off of at the moment), I am trying to use it to do a basic copy/transfer between one file to another.

 

When opening through windows, I have a Top Folder called "TestFolder".  I am trying to move its contents to another top folder called "TempTestFolder". 

 

What I am gathering is that I need to use a code similar to:

 

rsync -avh /root/testfolder /temptestfolder

 

And of course I get errors that no such file or directory exists.

 

Why do i get the distinct feeling that I have my unraid server set up horribly....

[warmarshall2nd]

Here is the exact error with the command line I am using:

 

root@HomeDatabase:~# rsync -avh /testfolder /temptestfolder
sending incremental file list
rsync: link_stat "/testfolder" failed: No such file or directory (2)

sent 18 bytes  received 12 bytes  60.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1189) [sender=3.1.3]

 

Also trying out Krusader (clearly I like GUIs better), but running into difficulties with SMB and Windows 10 Authentication...

 

My sincerest apologies....

[JonathanM]

For a semi graphical way to browse around the file system and get acquainted with where things are located, I suggest typing mc at the command line.

 

Hint. Look in /mnt/user for stuff on your array

 

To backup stuff from the array to a drive not physically connected to the unraid box you will need to map a path to it that shows up locally. Most people use the Unassigned Devices plugin to do this, in which case the foreign drive will show up in /mnt/disks when you configure it correctly.

 

Once you figure out the full paths to the files you want to backup and the destination, then you can use the rsync command to do the copy, and the user scripts plugin to schedule it to repeat automatically.

[warmarshall2nd]

Thank you. I will give these a shot when I get home tonight.

 

its strange I should have thought to use mnt but in krusader everything shows up as being in the “media” share/folder and that mnt is empty. Here’s hoping!

[JonathanM]

2 hours ago, warmarshall2nd said:

Thank you. I will give these a shot when I get home tonight.

 

its strange I should have thought to use mnt but in krusader everything shows up as being in the “media” share/folder and that mnt is empty. Here’s hoping!

If you look at the configuration for your krusader docker, you will notice that /mnt/user is mapped to /media

[warmarshall2nd]

17 hours ago, jonathanm said:

For a semi graphical way to browse around the file system and get acquainted with where things are located, I suggest typing mc at the command line.

 

Hint. Look in /mnt/user for stuff on your array

 

To backup stuff from the array to a drive not physically connected to the unraid box you will need to map a path to it that shows up locally. Most people use the Unassigned Devices plugin to do this, in which case the foreign drive will show up in /mnt/disks when you configure it correctly.

 

Once you figure out the full paths to the files you want to backup and the destination, then you can use the rsync command to do the copy, and the user scripts plugin to schedule it to repeat automatically.

 

Success!  I was finally able to copy a folder to another folder via rsync.  The mnt/user was definitely the problem.  Man, am I thick.  Okay, one thing I noticed was that when I did the copy it put the entire target folder into the new folder...  Is it possible to move just the contents of a folder to another folder?   Or will I have to just put up with that

 

Further, while mapping using SMB, I seem to run into the same issue as I did earlier with Krusader.  If I am using Windows 10, what username/password would I be using to be able to remote into the system?  I tried My Microsoft Account info, but of course that did not work. 

 

At one point it looked like it was going to work, and I successfully sent my test file from the TestFolder to the mapped Testfolder on the network machine (my Windows 10 main computer), but it was not there.  I was able to locate the file in a created folder in the /mnt/user/C:/TestFolder through Krusader, but it was not actually present on the drive on the main machine.  I'm guessing it's a combination of not correctly authenticating and once again not knowing how to correctly map.  It looks like, once I can correctly authenticate, I can have Unassigned Devices automatically detect the shares/folders on the main computer (or whatever machine i end up using until I can build my second array).

 

I find this all fascinating, if not frustrating.