Hello,

 

I am now fully invested in Unraid, i'm very happy with my main Nas server, it works good and i've bougt a another smaller server to do some backups to of content i cannot loose.

 

I am now wondering what the best solutions to do backups between 2 unraid servers are? The servers have contact with each other on the network, only 1gbps at the moment though. I only want to do incremental backups of certain shares on the main server.

 

How would you go about this?

I feel like using fstab on the backup server to mount the shares via smb on boot and then use a rsync command is the best solution? yes/no?

Edited November 21, 20196 yr by je82

1 hour ago, je82 said:

I am now wondering what the best solutions to do backups between 2 unraid servers are?

There are a couple of dockers (Resilio, Syncthing) that can do this, but, complaints are they are slow.  I tried out Syncthing and was unimpressed with its performance.  

 

I am doing straight rsync over SSH in an automated script (once a week on Monday) that has been running flawlessly for almost two years.  There is a learning curve for getting the SSH stuff setup properly, but, once that is done it just works.  It may take you a few days to get it all figured out, but, once you do, it is "set it and forget it."

 

Since my backup server supports IPMI, the script also powers the server on before the backup and off afterwards.  It also emails me a summary of everything that was done. I believe the original script and my modified script are both in the thread I linked.

 

This may or may not be what you are looking for, but, it is an option to consider should it meet your needs.

4 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

This may or may not be what you are looking for, but, it is an option to consider should it meet your needs.

Wrong, i actually have no docker/wm support on my box anyway, i strictly use it for storage so this is exactly what i was looking for! Thanks!

The original script posted by the OP backs up disk to disk because he has the exact same disk/capacity configuration in both servers.  I do not, so I modified the script to backup share to share.  It only backs up new/modified files. 

 

The script does not delete any files on the backup that have been deleted from the source server.  I run a separate script every three to four months to do that cleanup so I have time to determine if anything needs to be recovered from the backup server. This has saved my bacon twice as a folder for an entire year's worth of photos somehow disappear from the source server and I lost a Movies folder that contained about 20 movies.  In both cases, I was able to recover them from the backup server.

8 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

 I run a separate script every three to four months to do that cleanup so I have time to determine if anything needs to be recovered from the backup server.

Yeah thats smart, i am wondering if it is possible to get sort of the same capability as ipmi with wol as long as the servers are on the same subnet/lan?

Only the host server has ipmi, the backup server does not, it's one of these "gaming" motherboards so it has no good stuff, only blinking neon lights

 

How exactly do you go about knowing which files need to be deleted after x months that do no longer exist on the source server?

4 hours ago, je82 said:

i am wondering if it is possible to get sort of the same capability as ipmi with wol as long as the servers are on the same subnet/lan?

Yes, my first attempt at this was with a MB that did not have IPMI.  It supported S3 sleep and woke just fine.  Instead of the IPMI commands I am using now, I had WOL and sleep commands.  The only caveat is that some boards do not support sleep/wake with unRAID.  Fortunately, mine did.

 

4 hours ago, je82 said:

How exactly do you go about knowing which files need to be deleted after x months that do no longer exist on the source server?

In both cases I mentioned, I happened to notice that the folders in question were missing.  Folder hashes could be generated and compared between servers but that would only work if the folder on the source server had no new/modified files.

 

There is also a Recycle Bin plugin (I don't use it myself) put all deleted files in the bin until they are manually or automatically deleted on a schedule.