How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

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realdannys
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How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

Post by realdannys »

At first the QNAP was the backup device, but now it's taken over from my Mac mini server with the amount of things and services it's running I need to back IT up!

There's plenty of options to replicate the data you have on it, but there seems to be no way to backup the actual systems, it's applications, dockers, images etc all in one package so you could restore them if it fails.

This seems a bit of an oversight by QNAP considering the amount of backup options there are for your actual data on the disks. It's easier enough to back up individual shares you've made for say container station but a lot of apps and their settings are hidden away in system folders - and even if you backed those up, there's no easy way to just restore them if you ever had to re imagine the entire system - it would be a bigger job than any of the computers on my network, all my macOS devices could be restore from the Qnap in mere minutes as an imagine but I don't have the option to do it the other way around unless i'm missing something?
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dolbyman
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Re: How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

Post by dolbyman »

nope .. was requested many times .. but QNAP still hasn't implemented any bare metal backup/recovery
realdannys
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Re: How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

Post by realdannys »

That's a shame, thanks for confirming.

Ironically my backup solution has now become my biggest worry - if this NAS ever failed it'd take me ages to set everything back up again. I'm more concerned about that than the data it current holds which is replicated in multiple places ha.

I guess perhaps an easier way would be to create an Linux VM and run everything you use app and docker wise within that and then just back that single image up.
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dolbyman
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Re: How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

Post by dolbyman »

I use veeam, so all that is needed would be the NAS shares for a restore .. even a bare system can do that
realdannys
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Re: How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

Post by realdannys »

dolbyman wrote: Fri Feb 26, 2021 1:57 am I use veeam, so all that is needed would be the NAS shares for a restore .. even a bare system can do that
How does that work?
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dolbyman
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Re: How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

Post by dolbyman »

veeam backup on the clients with the qnap as target

client baremetal recovery media contains network drivers, that can then use the nas as source for the recovery

all the nas has to do, is to be there and serve smb

so not much needed than bare config
realdannys
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Re: How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

Post by realdannys »

Oh so you mean you're not running apps, dockers, etc on the qnap itself, you're just talking about restoring your clients that backup to the NAS?
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dolbyman
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Re: How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

Post by dolbyman »

I do run Plex

But the key to a stressless QNAP admin life, is to keep the QNAP itself as lean as possible ..to use it as storage only ..so a bare metal restore for apps and stuff, is not a big deal
realdannys
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Re: How can I acutally backup my QNAP NAS itself??

Post by realdannys »

Yeah a good point - although when you've got a 4 core Xeon and 64gb of ram with access to Docker it seems a bit of a waste. But I see your point. Still a Ubuntu or something running on it that you can clone entirely and backup which then runs all the things you want to run inside of it, rather than using QNAP apps - would be very easy to restore to any other NAS and have up and running quite quickly with some network assignment.
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