After installing my first unRAID setup (version 4.6), my biggest concern is that my files from my Pictures share will be deleted.

 

I have seen posts suggesting using rsync, and a secondary unRAID server... But this is not a backup technique.

 

If my wife deletes 200 photos from the Pictures share, then rsync will go and syncronise the the share, resulting in the 200 files missing from the destination of the rsync job. This is no better than the built in redundancy of unRAID! (parity based single drive failure protection)

 

 

Backup idea:

 

 

Create a "Backup" SMB share.

 

Within this share have a Pictures folder

Within the Pictures folder have the following folders

2010Jan21

2010Jan20

2010Jan19

2010Jan18

2010Jan17

etc...

 

 

 

Within these folders, make the filesystem show what really was in the share on that given date.

 

 

 

 

On the Pictures share, have a checkbox

"backup this share"

Keep data for x Days

 

 

 

This should be able to recover from fat finger accidential deletion.

 

rsync can be used to create the dated snapshots you have described using the technique discussed in

http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html

 

I run a similar script to "backup":

1. from Macs to an unRAID NFS mounted share (SMB mounts don't understand links, and instead recopies every file...)

2. files on unRAID diskA (working set of files from PC) to a dated snapshot of the files on unRAID diskB (i.e. date stamped backup of the working set)

 

If my wife deletes 200 photos from the Pictures share, then rsync will go and syncronise the the share, resulting in the 200 files missing from the destination of the rsync job.

 

Not necessarily.  You can set up rsync to not delete anything on the destination.

see my rsync-linked-backup script at http://code.google.com/p/unraid-weebotech/downloads/list

It provides a framework for backing up to a dated directory using the linked-dest technique.

 

You will need 1x current space of area to backup plus whatever the incremental changes are for the period of time you keep.

 

 

 

Here I use Crashplan and SNAP to backup to an external USB disk.

 

SNAP mount it when hotplugged, and Crashplan is smart enough to recognize when the disk is mounted. The only thing I've not automated is the drive umount and eject, but soon I will try to automate it too.