Local Backups

[ghostlobster]

All,
I've been struggling with finding an easy way to backup my data stored on my FreeNAS box locally to my external drive and was able to get things backing up using a bit of a roundabout kludge. I attached a 2TB external drive to my system and created a ZFS volume. I then created a user for backups and made that user as the owner of the volume within the GUI, setting the permissions recursively. Then, I created a RSync module, pointing to that new volume and using the new user, setting permissions to read/write. Then, created a new RSync push task, snagging the file system I want backed up from my main data volume, pointing back to the blocal host name, setting it to run nightly at 12:01AM every day. Well, what do you know, it worked!

While this post is mostly intended to be informative, I would appreciate it if someone who has a better, easier way of managing to get this done would let me know and post it here. Basically, what is anyone else using for local backups?

 

[sysfu]

For now I'm doing manual back to back zfs send / recv commands to stream a snapshot of my raidz array to a single large drive. I have an HP Microserver where I slapped a StarTech 5.25in Trayless Hot Swap Mobile Rack for 3.5in Hard Drive into the optical bay. I put a single large backup 3.5" SATA drive in there then created a another volume called "backuppool" on it.

Then I create a snapshot of my main file volume disk pool with zfs snapshot -r mainpool@xfer

Since there doesn't seem to be any facility in the GUI for local replication, for now I'm just running manual zfs snapshot streaming commands like so

zfs send -R mainpool@xfer | zfs recv -dvF backuppool

That seems to dump a backup somewhat faster than rsync.