[HOWTO] Daily incremental backup with rsnapshot

[micke]

Is it possible to change rsnapshot path for backup?

Change 'snapshot_root' in rsnapshot.conf.

/Mike

[mouldyolddough]

Is this available for the TS209 Pro II. I already have OptWare installed. I have been looking on the main Backup page for a solution to my problem. I can get a normal synchronise job to run initially but any subsequent sync jobs seem to fail due to the external hd going into standby and not being avaiable for when the sync update job runs. Is there any way around my problem?

Thanks.

[Tamadite]

I would like to store my backups on a network drive/share mounted on my qnap. This sentence in one of the posts confuses me: "You only need to install it on the machine that will be storing the backups."

By installing rsnapshot on the qnap, will I be able to backup qnap folders onto a network drive/share? If not, do you have any suggestion?

[Eduardo]

I would like to store my backups on a network drive/share mounted on my qnap. This sentence in one of the posts confuses me: "You only need to install it on the machine that will be storing the backups."

By installing rsnapshot on the qnap, will I be able to backup qnap folders onto a network drive/share? If not, do you have any suggestion?

Not sure what you mean. My rsnapshot backups some shares of the Qnap onto another share of the same Qnap (labeled "rsnapshot"). Is this the way you want?

[Tamadite]

Not sure what you mean. My rsnapshot backups some shares of the Qnap onto another share of the same Qnap (labeled "rsnapshot"). Is this the way you want?

I have mounted a network drive on my qnap with mount.cifs. This network drive is available on another machine on my LAN.

[crushdepth]

By installing rsnapshot on the qnap, will I be able to backup qnap folders onto a network drive/share? If not, do you have any suggestion?

rsnapshot pulls remote directories down to the machine it is installed on. I do not think it can copy them onto a network share hosted by some other machine. You could however put rsnapshot on the 2nd machine (if it is a Linux machine) and use that to backup your QNAP folders directly.

At work we have 2 QNAPs, one is the office file server and the other one is a backup machine with rsnapshot. You could easily use a PC with rsnapshot as the backup server though.

[Tamadite]

My idea of backing-up my QNAP onto the Apple Time Capsule with rsnapshot (rsync) will not work because file system HFS+ (Time Capsule) does not support hard links when created via cifs (mount.cifs).

Code: Select all

ln: creating hard link `test' => `test2': Operation not supported

In any case, when I tried it I could see rsnapshot created the QNAP file structure onto Apple Time Capsule of the folder I wanted to backup.

If you have a better idea of how to backup QNAP onto Apple Time Capsule, please drop a comment.

[AnthonyPaulO]

Hey guys,

I have a TS-459 Pro (w/ Intel Atom CPU) and given the options of two Arm and one Intel x86 package, I downloaded the Intel x86 package (I assume this is okay? Atom is x86 compatible, right?), installed it and enabled it. I then SSH'd in as admin and tried the command "ipkg update" but it fails with the error "cannot execute binary file". I thought it may be a permissions issue so I did a chmod 755 on it and still the same error. I have no idea what to do at this point, I really need an incremental backup solution badly and I can't believe the QNAPs don't support such basic backup functionality. (That and the limited access control permissions scheme where it's basically all-or-nothing access and I can't prevent people from deleting all data unless they have read-only access, but that's a separate issue *sigh!*)

Any thoughts on what I can do to make this package work?

Anthony

[bramschats]

try execute the bin/ipkg update or opt/bin/ipkg update, this worked for me.

[AnthonyPaulO]

Hi Bramschats,

I get the same error in both locations; I must be doing something wrong. Here's a console listing :

[/opt/bin] # ls -alt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 admin administ 4 Feb 4 12:11 ipkg-opt -> ipkg*
drwxr-xr-x 2 admin administ 4096 May 18 2010 ./
drwxr-xr-x 7 admin administ 4096 May 18 2010 ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 admin administ 2952 May 18 2010 ipkg*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 admin administ 4248 May 18 2010 update-alternatives*
[/opt/bin] # ipkg update
-sh: /opt/bin/ipkg: cannot execute binary file

FYI, I installed Optware_0.99.163_x86.qpkg and it's currently enabled.

Thanks in advance,

Anthony

[AnthonyPaulO]

Sorry guys, I'm an idiot... I have a 419P, not a 459P, which means I should go with the ARM version. My apologies!

Anthony

[TroyC]

Thanks for the "how to!" Worked like a charm for me.

It's even easier to setup if you are just using QNAP as source and eSATA for rsnapshot destination:

1) No need to setup encryption key pairs
2) No need to modify autorun.sh
3) No need to reboot and test 1 & 2

Take care.

[LosMintos]

By the way, if anyone has any feedback on how well (or not) this is working for them, I would appreciate it.

First off all, thank you very much for your effort! It helped me (beginner) a lot to establish regular backups from NAS to external disc.

The tutorial (I refer to the PDF attached to this thread) is nicely written and shows some nice tweaks, e.g. the editor nano. However, in Step 3 the reader might want to get a more detailed outline. For example, that one has to give the full path (e.g. /share/MD0_DATA/...) instead of symbolic shared folder's name isn't obvious to new users nor mentioned in regular rsnap(shot) HowTo's.

Here's my experience, TS-439 ProII+, 3.3.6 Build 1110T, backup to external eSATA-Drive. Backup volume is appr. 400 GB. The first run of rsnapshot took almost 23 hours (!). The very next run 90 seconds, only (almost no changed files). The log-file told me, that within the 23 hours the cronjob tried to start rsnapshot (no success, process locked). Did that hinder the running rsnapshot process?

[crushdepth]

Thanks for your feedback, I will take another look at revising the guide soon.

No the cron job shouldn't affect it, rsnapshot creates a lockfile when it is running that prevents it being started again while it is working. The cron job would not have failed and rsnapshot would have just kept running until it finished.

[LosMintos]

The cron job would not have failed and rsnapshot would have just kept running until it finished.

That means, 400 GB in 23 hours, a net rate of appr. 4.8 MB/sec (remember, to eSATA). Is it normal?