MacOS Photos requires that you store your photos in their special filesystem. My MacOS doesn't have sufficient disk space to store all my photos and I would like them to be backed up.
I created a disk image on a share on my ReadyNas server. Unfortunately, the disk image itself is too big to backup via ReadyNAS Vault.
To backup my photos, what I ended up doing is enabling SSH on my MacOS, then using "remote: Rsync over SSH" to recursively copy all the files from the MacOS mounted disk image to a directory on the ReadyNAS server. This was working fine for a long time, but now I get an error:
"Error backup job DavidPhotos: Failure during copy."
but there is no details at all what this error is. When I go to the backup log for the Backup task, the log window is empty. (FWIW, I have never seen content in the log window).
The backup will run for about 15mins, then I get the 'Failed' indicator.
Does anyone know where I can find out why it is failing?
Re: RSync over SSH failing without logs or details
Because the disk image is too big to back up, I am actually copying the photos out of the disk image into a flat directory structure. Pasted below the Backup screens.
Because the disk image is too big to back up, I am actually copying the photos out of the disk image into a flat directory structure.
Sorry, I was confused on what you are saying. I don't know how to configure an rsync daemon on the mac (setting it up to allow access to the disk image) - I'm not a Mac user. Perhaps someone else here can give you some tips.
Have you tried doing this the other way around - running rsync on the Mac, with the NAS share as the target? That might be easier. I suggest starting with rsync, instead of rsync over ssh. Then you can sort out getting the ssh part to work after you get rsync running.
If the disk image is mounted on the Mac, you could also use something like FreeFileSync.
Re: RSync over SSH failing without logs or details
Thanks for your help.
RSync over SSH was working just fine, so I am not sure why it is now failing, and I don't know how to get ReadyNAS to provide to me a detailed failure description. All I get is that 'it failed'. If there was a location on the ReadyNAS where I could log in and see a full transcript of the Backup job, that would be helpful. Or even if there was a way to get the command line that the ReadyNAS runs, I could try running it manually myself from the console on the ReadyNAS I could see where it failed.
I have not tried it the other way, ie run the job on the Mac as I don't have a good way to schedule jobs on the mac. Let me look into FreeFileSync. (Though it is unfortunate that the tools provided by ReadyNAS that I paid for as part of my ReadyNAS don't work)
RSync over SSH was working just fine, so I am not sure why it is now failing, and I don't know how to get ReadyNAS to provide to me a detailed failure description. All I get is that 'it failed'.
So this exact scenario was working before (using an rsync-over-ssh backup job to pull files from a remote MacOS disk image)?
Are you seeing any photos in the destination share?
If there was a location on the ReadyNAS where I could log in and see a full transcript of the Backup job, that would be helpful. Or even if there was a way to get the command line that the ReadyNAS runs, I could try running it manually myself from the console
This isn't as much information as there could be here. Backups are run using a Netgear backup utility (/frontview/bin/fvbackup). As far as I can tell, that generates the actual backup command(s) on the fly. There are some logs in /var/log/frontview/backup/, but they don't have the info you are looking for. journalctl --no-pager | grep -i rsync might give you a little info - but in my experience, not a whole lot.
You might be able to catch the command line from ssh using something like ps -aux | grep -i rsync if you can enter this while the backup job is running.
Though it is unfortunate that the tools provided by ReadyNAS that I paid for as part of my ReadyNAS don't work
FWIW, I am thinking the actual problem is on the mac side. The NAS can connect to the rsync daemon there, but that doesn't mean that the rsync daemon is configured to access the files in the disk image. But as I said earlier, I'm not a mac user.
So a permissions issue on the mac side. You could try excluding .TemporaryItems in the backup job settings. Though the permissions might still be a problem with the remaining files/folders.
