Step by Step of my TarSnap Installation (x86)

Hi Everyone,

It looks like I might be the first person to try out Tarsnap for online backup to S3, so I thought I'd post how I got it running so far. I strongly recommend you read through the documentation if you plan on using this to backup production data so that you understand the importance of the key file (get a copy off your NAS!) and how to properly create backups and perform restores.

Step 1: Signup (https://www.tarsnap.com/register.cgi) and Funded Account w/ $5 (for testing).

Step 2: Installed the SSH addon in FrontView.

Step 3: Downloaded PUTTY (SSH Client) and connected to my NAS.

Step 4: Downloaded and Extracted Tarsnap (see: https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html for latest download)

cd /root
wget https://www.tarsnap.com/download/tarsnap-autoconf-1.0.32.tgz
gzip -d tarsnap-autoconf-1.0.32.tgz
tar -xvf tarsnap-autoconf-1.0.32.tar

Step 5: Installed Pre-reqs. Nano is optional but awesomely helpful if you're not a vi guru. Also, zlib1g-dev was already installed, but can't hurt just in case I suppose...

apt-get install libssl-dev
apt-get install zlib1g-dev
apt-get install e2fslibs-dev 
apt-get install gcc
apt-get install make
apt-get install nano

Step 6: Configure & Compile Tarsnap (folder name will be based on version you downloaded above.

cd tarsnap-autoconf-1.0.32
./configure
make all install clean 

Step 7: Now that Tarsnap is installed, create a unique key file (like a password, but better). The email needs to match what you used when you signed up (I think):

tarsnap-keygen --keyfile /root/tarsnap.key --user <yourname@yourdomain.com> --machine <machinename>

Step 8: Configure Tarsnap using the default configuration file. If you want to change the cachedir or location of keyfile, use nano to edit it and modify the path in the creation of the cachedir.

cp /usr/local/etc/tarsnap.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/tarsnap.conf
tarsnap --cachedir /usr/local/tarsnap-cache --fsck --keyfile /root/tarsnap.key

Step 9: Create your test backup (testdata is the name of a share I have - use one of your own!), then restore it back to /tmp, and finally delete it:

tarsnap -c -f testBackup /c/testdata
cd /tmp
tarsnap -x -f testBackup c/testdata
tarsnap -d -f testBackup

Step 10 would be setting up a job to run this regularly, or to run it manually as you needed, which I'll leave as an exercise for the reader for now. I am not now, nor have I ever, affiliated with Tarsnap in any way - just playing around with it as a neat technology. If anyone has any suggestions on how this could be installed better, or any potential conflicts you see (I'm new to ReadyNAS), please contribute! :)

Good luck!