Realtime backup from Windows 10 to freeNAS

[faabiiiooo]

Hello everybody,

I'm about to change from Synology to freeNAS. The only thing that keeps me back from migrating is, that i havent found a good and free or cheap solution to make a real time backup of files from a Win10 client. Something like DSM Cloud backup would be great.
Does anyone know something like that, what will work for freeNAS and a Win10 client?

Kind Regards,
Fabio

 

[joeschmuck]

There are solutions out there such as Marcrium which can be free or paid, so I'm told. I use paid Macrium at work and I like it. I use Acronis 2018 on my home computer (Win 7 & 10) but that is a paid product. Scheduling backups is very easy. You also should be able to use Windoze Backup but I do not like my past experiences where you need to reinstall Windoze and then perform the recovery, what a pain.

 

[scrappy]

The backup utility built into Windows 10 (If that's what you're using) works great over a FreeNAS Samba share. No need, IMHO, to use 3rd party software. I guess it won't backup in real-time, but you can have it set to backup every hour.

 

[Yorick]

I’m using Veeam Agent for Windows free. I used to use Acronis, but Veeam is so much better with their “continuous integration” full backup. I’m backing up once a day and keep 61 days. You could back up once an hour of course.

One caveat: Veeam restore stick doesn’t support WSDD, so you’re going to type in the full path to the backup share when restoring from stick. Try it at least once to get a feel for that.

 

[faabiiiooo]

Thanks a lot for your responses. I will test all of your recommendations and choose one of them.

 

[joeschmuck]

I’m using Veeam Agent for Windows free. I used to use Acronis, but Veeam is so much better with their “continuous integration” full backup. I’m backing up once a day and keep 61 days. You could back up once an hour of course.

One caveat: Veeam restore stick doesn’t support WSDD, so you’re going to type in the full path to the backup share when restoring from stick. Try it at least once to get a feel for that.

I agree, always try the backup operations and also the restore operation (to a blank/unformatted drive) just to ensure you know that whatever solution you use works. I've heard good things about Veeam, only tried it once but since I had paid software I knew worked for me I just stuck with that.

 

[Yorick]

Acronis annoyed me one too many times. It got in a tizzy with missing (older) full backups and though I had a recent full backup, it took half a day of banging rocks together to restore. It really shouldn’t be that hard.

That was the reason to switch to Veeam - and then I learned I was stuck in the 90s with my “periodic full backup” idea, and could keep one full backup that would have the incremental integrated into it as they age. I’m not sure whether Acronis does that, or whether I trust them to do that well.

Whatever works, does.

 

[nikalai2]

Another free / good solution is Cobian Backup.

We used Acronis at work for virtual machines backup and some of the workstations. I confirm that Veeam is a better solution. The restore process was very slow with Acronis.

 

[hervon]

Urbackup does wonders too, install the server in a jail.

 

[Dan Tudora]

Hello everybody,

I'm about to change from Synology to freeNAS. The only thing that keeps me back from migrating is, that i havent found a good and free or cheap solution to make a real time backup of files from a Win10 client. Something like DSM Cloud backup would be great.
Does anyone know something like that, what will work for freeNAS and a Win10 client?

Kind Regards,
Fabio

hello
I use Veeam agent but I read about that and I intend to try.
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/asigra-plugin/

 

[Yorick]

That does look nifty. I duckduckwent a little and I think Asigra does not fit my needs well.

Pro:
- Global dedupe across multiple machines (laptops, servers)
- “Agentless” on the LAN where the client lives; use mobile agent for roaming folk
- Detects changed data and backs it up in near real time

Con:
- Bare Metal Restore means restoring an OS first (a 3 year old post claims that the “base OS” has to be “identical” - are we talking, for example, any Win10 will do, or it has to be the version of Win10 that I am restoring to?), then restoring OS, applications and data on top of that, and OS files get replaced upon reboot. https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1747716-impressions-asigra-bare-metal-restore-function
- Java management client - ugh. Personal preference here, for sure - I just really can’t stand Java clients, and I am worried it’s WebStart - though, not having tried it, it might not be.

The way BMR works is fine in a corporate environment. “Restore” will usually be of a single file, sometimes of data and applications when a PC is replaced - but most likely not even that, as the data are kept on a file share and the applications are expected to be reinstalled -rarely of a complete DB, almost never of a complete server.

In contrast, the only time I am doing a restore in my home environment is when I need a BMR. Either the boot drive failed, or my aggressive testing of pre-release versions of Windows killed the system completely. Both have happened to me, and having a seamless BMR has always been the backstop that gives me confidence that I can run such tests on my daily driver - if it goes belly-up, just restore.

For my use case, Veeam continues to be the better choice, because of the better BMR experience.

Someone who cares more about dedup and continuous backup, and rarely if ever needs BMR, would likely be the ideal user of Asigra.

 

[joeschmuck]

Acronis annoyed me one too many times. It got in a tizzy with missing (older) full backups and though I had a recent full backup, it took half a day of banging rocks together to restore. It really shouldn’t be that hard.

That was the reason to switch to Veeam - and then I learned I was stuck in the 90s with my “periodic full backup” idea, and could keep one full backup that would have the incremental integrated into it as they age. I’m not sure whether Acronis does that, or whether I trust them to do that well.

Whatever works, does.

I can relate to Acronis being a pain to use depending on the version you have. That company screwed up in my opinion when they dumbed down the interface. It was such a great product over 10 years ago. Thankfully the 2018 version has brought back some stability, but I'm not defending Acronis. YMMV. Veeam should work just as well.

The restore process was very slow with Acronis.

Odd, mayby that is in a VM world because restorations for me on a single hard drive are very quick, my limitation is the network connection speed so if I use an external USB drive as a backup location (I do that when I'm upgrading a hard drive) then the restore process just flies. Again, I'm not defending Acronis as there are many options out there and free ones that work just fine. And Macrium should be free for a single home user (according to a friend of mine who uses it at home) with super easy restoration of the entire drive/OS.

 

[HolyK]

Macrium Home (paid) fan here. Restoring have never been easier...

 

[Chris Moore]

Has anyone tried the Asigra plugin yet? The folks at iXsystems sent out an email, I got it today, promoting it.
I links back to this page on the blog: https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/asigra-plugin/
Which I see was mentioned above. I was just curious if anyone had tried it yet?

 

[joeschmuck]

Has anyone tried the Asigra plugin yet? The folks at iXsystems sent out an email, I got it today, promoting it.
I links back to this page on the blog: https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/asigra-plugin/
Which I see was mentioned above. I was just curious if anyone had tried it yet?

Interesting link. I've never heard of this product before and I'm curious how it works, more importantly a restoration works.

 

[Yorick]

Restore is, according to the onlines, a case of reinstalling OS, then restoring, and one final reboot. No BMR as such.

 

[joeschmuck]

Restore is, according to the onlines, a case of reinstalling OS, then restoring, and one final reboot. No BMR as such.

Yea, not what I desire to do. I very much dislike reinstalling the OS first. I recall when Ghost first came out, probably before most of the kids on this forum were born (1995 accoring to Wiki, feels like longer). What a welcome tool.

 

[Mlovelace]

Yea, not what I desire to do. I very much dislike reinstalling the OS first. I recall when Ghost first came out, probably before most of the kids on this forum were born (1995 accoring to Wiki, feels like longer). What a welcome tool.

I have a windows XP box at work that can't be upgraded because of the instrument it is running that is still being backed up by Ghost. Great product and I was also an early advocate for it. That being said, I have been a Veeam evangelist since B&R 6 released back in summer 2011. Amazing product and the support has been stellar.

 

[ovizii]

I have 2 questions regarding Asigra, maybe someoen can help answer them:

Has anyone found more info on how exactly the data flow is when using the asigra freenas plugin? Is the data beeing backed up transmitted from the clients to the asigra jail, then stored on whatever target I have defined and not leaving my LAN except if I defined a target for the backups in the cloud?

Not related to Freenas at all:
How does this free version with backup capability for up to 10 systems and 10 cloud accounts at no charge work? I'm considering running asigra inside a docker container so I was wondering how/where to get this free account from?

 

[Chris Moore]

I recall when Ghost first came out, probably before most of the kids on this forum were born (1995 accoring to Wiki, feels like longer). What a welcome tool.

I might not be as old as you, but I remember using Ghost back then. For a little while, it got big enough that they needed two floppy disks, remember that? Then they optimized the code and got it back down to where it would all fit on one disk again. It was still a good and useful tool the last time I had a copy of it. They still have a page for it on the Symantec sight: https://www.symantec.com/products/ghost-solutions-suite