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Forum Discussion
Which backup method?
So there are two primary backup methods provided in frontview, for purpose of backing up my volume data. There is the so called "File Backup" and there is ReadyDR. I'm assuming my machine (524x) su...
All great points.
So I pulled out my old ultra2plus. Turns out I had already upgraded its ram and is OS somewhere along the line. It has 6.10.5, do you know if I can still get 6.10.9 firmware in order to bring it up to date with my 524x? Also are there any known hdd size limitations with this hardware?
Totally hear you about the HDD quality. For a NAS backup drive I will probably get a recertified enterprise drive. As big as I can go, non-raid. ServerPartDeals has Exos and WDUltraStar drives up in the 26TB size range for 250-350 bucks.
https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives
If I were gonna get an external USB drive, I confess I would probably have gotten one of Seagate's external drives which are probably about the same price as these recertified drives, but people say they have Barracudas inside generally, there is no garauntee, Seagate doesn't even publish what's in it. No idea if they are SMR or CMR at this point, but generally I like all the points made about preferring a nas over a USB enclosure...and my ultra2plus is actually a nice tidy little box that is barely bigger then a USB enclosure. The fan is a little noisy but I can schedule it on and off power as you suggested.
I also like the idea of turning off all fire sharing on it, though I was going to also use it to backup Macs and pcs, not with timemachine, but I was gonna use SMB for that. Maybe I can get rsync working with them I'll look into that. Mostly I am Macs, and would rather use CCC to back them up, and in this case not even their entire backup, just some key data directories being backed up nightly. Well anyway, it's still a good point about turning off SMB to keep out any potential ransomware attack. As I understand it, if I use snapshots that can also be generally a good protection from that kind of ransomware attack as well perhaps.
I wanted to ask you something else also, you have mentioned using custom snapshot scheduling and I did that, but front view seems only include a 24 hour hourly grid to indicate when to create snapshots....but nothing to specify a retention policy. So I'm wondering if it's possible for me to use ssh to somehow tweak stuff under the covers to get a rentention policy that is similar as "SMART" but without forever monthly snapshots??? I'd also be generally interested in hearing more about any rsync backup customization scripts you have done, what might be involved or things you have thought about over the years to make your NAS 2 NAS backups solid.
I wanted to ask you something else also, you have mentioned using custom snapshot scheduling and I did that, but front view seems only include a 24 hour hourly grid to indicate when to create snapshots....but nothing to specify a retention policy.
I'd also be generally interested in hearing more about any rsync backup customization scripts you have done,
There is a description in this thread, though it might be hard to follow:
None of these are specific to rsync.
I've
- modified autopoweroff to suspend shutdown when a maintenance task is running
- manually adjusted the maintenance schedule in crontab
- added a script to create the log zip file once a day and upload it to the main NAS with rsync
(1) was needed because Netgear ignored my feedback. The NAS will shut down at the scheduled time even if a maintenance task is still running w/o my mod.
(2): The goal (not obvious) is to ensure that at least one of the three backup NAS is always turned off (essentially air-gapped). That gives me a chance to disconnect it from my network if malware were to strike. The approach is to dedicate a specific day+week of the month tor each NAS to run maintenance tasks (for instance, NAS 1 will run on the first Monday of the first week of the month, NAS 2 will run on the first Tuesday of the second week of the month). This change isn't relevant to what you are setting up.
(3) is a convenience, as it lets me review the logs w/o powering up the backup NAS. It also lets me review older logs - useful when a log gets truncated due to a flood of errors.
yea that is obviously there... What I meant is that the SMART mode has a more intelligent retention schedule where it keeps daily snapshots for only a certain retention period, then weekly, then monthly...all with different retentions, but the Monthly unfortunately is retained forward...I would like to make a retention policy that is just like SMART but doesn't keep monthly forever. I don't mind if I have to edit some config files or scripts somewhere under the covers.... is this even possible or am I stuck with only using one single retention that applies equally to daily, weekly, monthly?
I'll check out that other thread you did about all your customizations, definitely sounds interesting...
I would like to make a retention policy that is just like SMART but doesn't keep monthly forever.
Honestly I never saw the point to the snapshot "thinning" that the "Smart" Snapshots do. Generally the oldest snapshot takes most of the on-disk space. And there's a reasonable chance that the older version of the file I need was deleted by the process. Plus taking snapshots even when nothing in the share has changed just creates clutter in the snapshot list.
I find that just taking snapshots when things change, and limiting retention works well for me.
But back to your question, there is no way to automatically thin the snapshots from the web ui. You might be able to do it by modifying the snapper config files (/etc/snapper/configs). Not something I've ever researched though.
I assume you mean check the box that says only create automatic snapshots if there are actual changes..
I see what you mean though if I have daily all the way for say 3 months or 6 months and its only snapshotting changes...then it still shouldn't get that big really, any bigger in size then if they are thinned out to weekly, whatever big changes are in there will been the weekly ones, etc. so it won't save any space, it would just theoretically simplify what you look at or perhaps mimic Time Machine in some way...but I take your point. Thanks for pointing me to snapper though I will check that out also.
ps - I should have brought this ultra2plus back into action a long time ago, actually I'm impressed at how well it runs basic stuff, no plex or anything, but its handing iSCSI and rsync like a champ...I mean with a large HDD in there I could create a number of iSCSI LUN's which are handy for backing up Macs or doing a better job of Time Machine then the way all the NAS's usually do it.
I assume you mean check the box that says only create automatic snapshots if there are actual changes
yes
I should have brought this ultra2plus back into action a long time ago, actually I'm impressed at how well it runs basic stuff, no plex or anything, but its handing iSCSI and rsync like a champ
If I recall correctly, the Ultra 2 Plus hardware is the same as the Pro 2. Fast enough to saturate a gigabit ethernet connection for basic storage. My Pro 6 is still in service as part of my own backup plan.
I haven’t been able to saturate the 1gbit Ethernet yet while reading or writing. I can with iperf3 net tests I got 117MB/sec. But I don’t know what tool to use to find out max reading and writing coming also through network, and anyway the new hdd I ordered will be probably faster then this cheap old barracuda I’m testing with now. Doing an iscsi based backup from a Mac through apfs file system over iscsi and doing whatever overhead involved in backup software etc was maxing out about 50MB/sec but I don’t think ultra2plus was the bottleneck. And that is still pretty fast enough.
CPU is barely sweating, I think the hardware is fine for this use, but I recall it struggling with plex transcoding back in the day and I don’t even do any crazy transcoding. It also could not handle crashplan back then mainly because of not enough ram, but it may have been os4 and 1gb I can’t remember now. It was one of the reasons I bumped up to the 524x with ram upgraded to 16gb ecc
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