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Backup Plugin That Supports USB Drive
- Thread starter gwaitsi
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2016
- Messages
- 9,703
The plugins probably don't care about the connection method of the media they are backing up to.
No plugin will be taking into account the safe removal of USB media.
Yes. (TrueNAS SCALE and TrueNAS CORE both use OpenZFS 2.0 which covers both FreeBSD and Linux versions of OpenZFS)
Michael Wenyon
Dabbler
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2016
- Messages
- 23
If you research, you will find documentation warning that USB connections are unreliable in FreeNAS/TrueNAS.
Instead, I run a 'Replication Task' automatically to a single external 10 TB drive that is always connected to my FreeNAS Mini via eSATA. It is housed in a case with both USB and eSATA connections. The setup of pools on this drive was done in the TrueNAS web interface; I made one backup pool for each pool on the server, and set up the same number of scheduled Replication Tasks, again using the TrueNAS web interface. In effect I am backing up the pools rather than the disk. These backups are fast.
So, how do I read the files on the backup disk if my server hardware fails or the TrueNAS operating system fails? This question worried me for years and held me back from doing any backups at all. In my case, I began to feel more confident once I had set up ZFS on my Linux laptop and found that I could mount the backup drive ('import' the pools) on my laptop using some simple command-line ZFS instructions. That way, I was assured that even if the server equipment or operating system failed, I could still read the backup drive on a 'normal' computer. I have since repeated this restore exercise on a MacOS laptop running OpenZFS. Each pool appears as a disk on the Mac desktop once it has been imported.
My Linux and MacOS laptops do not have eSATA connections. But because the backup drive enclosure has both eSATA and USB, I use USB and then do the ZFS import at the command line. Each pool looks like a disk in the Linux file explorer and I can copy backed up files to another location. When I am finished, I 'export' the pools at the command line (important, it is a bit more than ordinary 'unmounting' of a USB drive), then unplug the USB drive after the laptop has shut down. I should note that I also export the backup pools from the TrueNAS server before shutting it down and unplugging the backup disk from there. If the server catastrophically failed there are commands to force the import to another system even if the pools on the backup disk were not properly exported.
I have never tried to connect to the FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) server using USB, only eSATA.
Needless to say, all of this will require a dive into the documentation to implement. But the software is all there in the TrueNAS operating system and automatically replicating the pools has some advantages.
Instead, I run a 'Replication Task' automatically to a single external 10 TB drive that is always connected to my FreeNAS Mini via eSATA. It is housed in a case with both USB and eSATA connections. The setup of pools on this drive was done in the TrueNAS web interface; I made one backup pool for each pool on the server, and set up the same number of scheduled Replication Tasks, again using the TrueNAS web interface. In effect I am backing up the pools rather than the disk. These backups are fast.
So, how do I read the files on the backup disk if my server hardware fails or the TrueNAS operating system fails? This question worried me for years and held me back from doing any backups at all. In my case, I began to feel more confident once I had set up ZFS on my Linux laptop and found that I could mount the backup drive ('import' the pools) on my laptop using some simple command-line ZFS instructions. That way, I was assured that even if the server equipment or operating system failed, I could still read the backup drive on a 'normal' computer. I have since repeated this restore exercise on a MacOS laptop running OpenZFS. Each pool appears as a disk on the Mac desktop once it has been imported.
My Linux and MacOS laptops do not have eSATA connections. But because the backup drive enclosure has both eSATA and USB, I use USB and then do the ZFS import at the command line. Each pool looks like a disk in the Linux file explorer and I can copy backed up files to another location. When I am finished, I 'export' the pools at the command line (important, it is a bit more than ordinary 'unmounting' of a USB drive), then unplug the USB drive after the laptop has shut down. I should note that I also export the backup pools from the TrueNAS server before shutting it down and unplugging the backup disk from there. If the server catastrophically failed there are commands to force the import to another system even if the pools on the backup disk were not properly exported.
I have never tried to connect to the FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) server using USB, only eSATA.
Needless to say, all of this will require a dive into the documentation to implement. But the software is all there in the TrueNAS operating system and automatically replicating the pools has some advantages.
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