how to backup to external USB hard drive

[mactsk]

Hi!
i need to set up a timed backup (weekly) on an external drive, so to prevent data loss in case of theft or other problems, i tried to find how to reliably mount and check if an external hdd is available, and then dismount(export?) it, but i'm not very skilled with command line, the external drive can be ntfs or zfs, probably zfs i think is better, and in case of need i am able to set up a vm to recover the files.

can anyone help?
(i don't need to backup the whole nas, only some critical folders, so one hdd or even a usb key is ok)

Thanx!

 

[warri]

This question seems to come up a lot recently, maybe you can find some answers in the following posts:
How to automount USB drices and SD-cards
Backing up volume to USB drive using Rsync for offsite backup

 

[James M Hudgins Jr]

I have been searching the same topic and found nothing. Anyway, I found a way to do it - as follows:
The solution is "Cron Jobs"
First you have to isolate a HD for your backups - I used an external hot swap doc, but any drive isolated from any of your system RAIDs

The following command line will sync all the data on "Mathews1" with "ServerBackup"
Mathews1 = SOURCE
ServerBackup = TARGET

All the data on source is replicated on target
The following command will accomplish this

rsync -zvr /mnt/Mathews1/Primary /mnt/ServerBackup/Backup --delete-after

The last part "--delete-after" will delete any files on TARGET that are no longer on SOURCE.

The following configuration of Cron Job runs this script every night at 11PM

THAT's ALL THERE IS TO IT - WORKS LIKE A CHAMP

I hope this helps.

 

[Mark WatIng]

hi just seen this and running now - thanks for the post!

 

[Leonhardt]

work's fine, easily done, thanks

 

[sabi-tech]

Raising the dead but this was the most helpful, sadly it didnt work for me. no data being written.

 

[Arwen]

@sabi-tech, I wrote a forum resource on manual local disk backups. Whence you have it working manually, you can then see about automating the process. Here is a link;

How to: Backup to local disks

This was not intended as a copy and paste procedure. Each person's backup requirements are different. So it's more of an example.