Newbie question regarding RSync

[tom__w]

Assuming that this is the correct forum... As I am sooooooo incredibly new to FreeNAS and Unix in general, please excuse the naivete of my question:

Using RSync, I am pushing everything my primary FreeNAS to backup FreeNAS on the same network. Pretty straight forward. My primary NAS has a single 5.1 TB volume. My backup NAS has a single 3.1 TB volume.

On my primary NAS the volume is divided into two file extents (ISCSI Sharing). One extent is being used for VMWare and the other for Windows. As well, each extent is 1 TB. The used disk space is approximately 93 GB. A small fraction of the 5.1 TB.

Now that I am RSync'ing, I see the the disk space used by my backup NAS is 230+ GB and still growing. The RSync has been running for 45 minutes or so.

I do not understand why the backup NAS volume is SO MUCH larger than the original? Do I have something backwards? Will I eventually have a problem with my backup NAS.

Tom

 

[tom__w]

Another tidbit of information:

The source directory is /mnt/ZFS1
and the target directory is /mnt/NAS1_DELL

If this makes a difference?

 

[tom__w]

So my RSync is done. Looking at my primary server I see that the 2 files there (File Extents) are equal to 2.3 TB. What a surprise ... that's what is now on my backup NAS.

I suppose I need to re-think using ISCSI as a means centrally storing my companies Windows data ... if I want to use RSync to backup.

 

[fracai]

Can you post the exact configuration that you're using for the rsync task?

My guess is that the sync keeps building up files on the remote side, without deleting files that have been deleted on the source. You could add the '--delete' flag to keep the destination an exact mirror of the source. Keep in mind that this will delete files on the destination that aren't on the source, so if you have anything that should be only on the destination you'll have to either move the data or use a different process.

Any reason you aren't using replication here?

 

[tom__w]

If this is what you are looking for:
00 17 27 * 1,2,3,4,5 root PATH="/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/root/bin" lockf -s -t 0 -k /mnt/ZFS1 rsync -r -t -z '/mnt/ZFS1' 192.168.254.9::RSync_Dell 2>&1 |/usr/bin/logger -t rsync

Note that this was the first time I ran the RSync so there would have been no existing files.

Also, as I mentioned in the post, if I look at the source volume using Winscp, I see two files that correspond to my ISCSI File Extents. These files are each 1 TB, as I configured in file extents.

As far as RSync versus replication, I am so new that I took the advice of the person without looking into it. Once I did, because the two machines were on the same network, I figured that RSync would be easier to setup than Replication.

But I am always open to better suggestions / ideas.

 

[fracai]

That command doesn't look like it's set to delete anything so I'd expect the backup to keep growing, but if that was the first backup I'm not sure why it'd differ in size like that. I can only assume there's something going on with how ISCSI data is stored. The only thing I can think of is to compare the number and size of the backed up files.