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Forum Discussion
Very disappointed with backup feature of 6.X
I've owned a 104 device for a while now and have just installed a 314 device at a customer.
Once the customer was up and running I started the process of deploying a simple backup solution - after all the GUI has lots of features to support this and the device has lots of local ports to plug external drives into, BUT
The first thing you find is that you can backup /data as an option, this should copy all the shares in their natural directory structure across to the target (a perfect solution you would think!) the problem is that the directory structure to handle the snapshots also sits under /data so this option tries to copy all the snapshots as well, so a 1TB share with 40 snapshots results in 41TB of backup. You also have no way to exclude directories with this option.... FAIL
The next choice is a backup per share, but you can not define a target directory for backups to local ports so all the shares get merged into a single directory structure on the target.... Again a FAIL
Rsync looping back to the same device does not seem an option as even if I could work out how to set it up it depends on an explicit account being set up against the target location, which being an external drive is dynamic, this is a shame as rsync allows directories to be excluded.... Third strike - FAIL
Rsync over SSH, looping back to the same device has the same advantage as just Rsync in terms of being abled to exclude directories, but there is no way to add the keys via the GUI and to do so via TTY means warnings about lossing access to support..... YET another FAIL
Rsync over SSH to an additional remote 314 device - again we have no supported way to add the required SSH keys - FAIL, FAIL FAIL.
So we have lots of backup options, but they are all about as useful as a chocolate teapot (as we say in the UK).
Once the customer was up and running I started the process of deploying a simple backup solution - after all the GUI has lots of features to support this and the device has lots of local ports to plug external drives into, BUT
The first thing you find is that you can backup /data as an option, this should copy all the shares in their natural directory structure across to the target (a perfect solution you would think!) the problem is that the directory structure to handle the snapshots also sits under /data so this option tries to copy all the snapshots as well, so a 1TB share with 40 snapshots results in 41TB of backup. You also have no way to exclude directories with this option.... FAIL
The next choice is a backup per share, but you can not define a target directory for backups to local ports so all the shares get merged into a single directory structure on the target.... Again a FAIL
Rsync looping back to the same device does not seem an option as even if I could work out how to set it up it depends on an explicit account being set up against the target location, which being an external drive is dynamic, this is a shame as rsync allows directories to be excluded.... Third strike - FAIL
Rsync over SSH, looping back to the same device has the same advantage as just Rsync in terms of being abled to exclude directories, but there is no way to add the keys via the GUI and to do so via TTY means warnings about lossing access to support..... YET another FAIL
Rsync over SSH to an additional remote 314 device - again we have no supported way to add the required SSH keys - FAIL, FAIL FAIL.
So we have lots of backup options, but they are all about as useful as a chocolate teapot (as we say in the UK).
4 Replies
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- I'm also rather disappointed that there is no option to load an SSH key to easily enable Rsync over SSH between two ReadyNAS devices.
Support told me that it is on the 'to do' list for a future release...
I had done some initial tests with Netgear Replicate, to backup from my RN104 to a remote RN102 and thought that is was not working well, however, after changing the default job names to names without "[" and"]" characters in it, it all works fine now, very easy to set up, and it delivers exactly what I was looking for!
It only misses the feature to exclude files, that is okay with me however...
So I'm not sure if Replicate would be an option for you, but you may want to give it a try. Just remember to change the name of the job into something that is Windows friendly :-) - Netgear Replicate is a solution that I plan to spend some time looking at for wide area backups, but
- It does not resolve the issue of being able to make local backups to attached drives.
- It does not resolve the ussie of being able to use a Readynas device as an Rsync SSH based target where a key must be installed.
- All the devices being used must be Netgear devices with the same major OS version.
I also dislike the fact we seem to have a set of very broken backup features built into our devices and NetGear's answer seems to be to create a totally independent tool that only works with its own products.
This makes no sense to me. Why do you want SSL, if the connection is local, and doesn't even leave the box?rit wrote: Rsync over SSH, looping back to the same device has the same advantage as just Rsync in terms of being abled to exclude directories, but there is no way to add the keys via the GUI and to do so via TTY means warnings about lossing access to support..... YET another FAIL - The utility is indeed limited, except if you Wireshark directly on the target interface, but this would require access to the NAS. Since there is no SSH standard user by default this would require root access, once you have that you don't really need to listen...
Could also be a spoof protection (like HTTPS), since there is a key exchange if key stored are not matching there will be an error, but this would mean that another device has got the same IP, and I believe that since this is a local interface it would also require that the interface is down (not sure the device will look on the network if it has this IP on one of its interfaces).
I also feel that backing up on the same device is not really useful anymore with snapshots. And if MD5 is enabled on top of that I don't see any use at all.
As for the Backup feature I'm not happy with it either. I had to exclude files matching a pattern inside a share, I wanted detailed logging, and the remote device only has SMB (no SSH/Rsync). Didn't have the courage to finish my script yet so checking is manual for the moment. I'm also thinking about checking the ressources usage (CPU/RAM mainly) before launching the script. Setting firewall temporary settings is also possible.
Scripting is definitely an option for your backups if you are not satisfied by shipped backup features.
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