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RN214 full backup and restore
I have had multiple previous generations of ReadyNAS using OS4 and OS5, for full system backup i simply backed up "/c" to an external USB drive. This copied all shares and user home areas, restore wa...
Are you planning to back up everything to a single USB drive? Or do you need multiple USB drives for the correct capacity?
Personally I've done share-by-share backup to other NAS myself (though restore is a bit simpler for me because I don't use home folders). But you can specify /data (or whatever your volume name is) as the local source or destination of a backup job. So you can restore everything after you re-create the shares and home folders.
The challenge with bare-metal restore is re-creating the NAS home folders before you restore. Accessing the NAS with each user's credentials is a pain (and of course you might not know their password). But you can log in with ssh, and then use rnutil mkhomedir_helper username to create it.
I believe the general procedure for you to do a bare-metal restore would be to
- do a factory install on the NAS
- reinstall the apps (needed before restoring the configuration)
- restore the NAS configuration
- recreate home folders with rnutil
- restore the data from the backup disk(s)
Are you planning to back up everything to a single USB drive? Or do you need multiple USB drives for the correct capacity?
Personally I've done share-by-share backup to other NAS myself (though restore is a bit simpler for me because I don't use home folders). But you can specify /data (or whatever your volume name is) as the local source or destination of a backup job. So you can restore everything after you re-create the shares and home folders.
The challenge with bare-metal restore is re-creating the NAS home folders before you restore. Accessing the NAS with each user's credentials is a pain (and of course you might not know their password). But you can log in with ssh, and then use rnutil mkhomedir_helper username to create it.
I believe the general procedure for you to do a bare-metal restore would be to
- do a factory install on the NAS
- reinstall the apps (needed before restoring the configuration)
- restore the NAS configuration
- recreate home folders with rnutil
- restore the data from the backup disk(s)
As of now, I have an 8TB Seagate external USB 3.0 drive, my data fits (using just over 6TB for a full backup).
I will play with /data (or my {volume name}, which is different) as you suggest, that bit wasn't obvious to me, looks like we have a potential solution. Actually, I just SSH'd into the RN214, and looked at the structure under the volume and this is exactly what I need. However, from the backup webif, selecting the volume folder only shows shares below that, home folders are shown separately at the top level, so I wasn't sure they'd be included in the backup of the volume. I'll now try backup and see what I get. I also note your comment on the user home folder creation issue (which I can workaround). Thanks for the tips.
I do believe full backup/restore is important to some users, the FAQ should capture this (perhaps Netgear can update the FAQ). We also need a simpler full restore process, if this can be fed back to the product team.
I confirm a backup of volume includes home folders (although not shown as included in the webif), and that's what I needed. This should be much easier than I feared, other than the user home folders issue mentioned above.
Thanks a lot!
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