Anyone know of an Offsite rsync guide for noob?!

[alexc40]

Hi guys
Been using freenas on an HP microserver in our office for just over a year now. Our ZFS data pool has 3x 2TB drives and 8gb ram.
I've built an identical machine with the idea of having a disaster proof solution so if the building at work burns down (or some other disaster) then we still have our data stored on a machine at my house.

I want the machine to do an rsync copy every night so it doesn't interfere with our work during the day, I've seen this documentation in the freenas guide http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Rsync_Tasks but it doesn't describe too well how to get the data to copy to an offsite freenas server.

I tried to setup the two machines side by side for the first rsync but with the lack of a progress bar I couldn't tell if what I'd done was working.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm getting nervous about my data now!

Thanks

Alex

 

[JaimieV]

Set up the two machines side by side, and rsync a small folder to make sure it all works. Yep, there's no progress bar - you'll have to eyeball the destination machine's contents to make sure it's there.

Then move the machine offsite, *preferably* to a location that you already have network access to. Change the destination hostname if necessary for the new location. Rerun the test - it should Just Work. There's no difference to rsync whether the servers are local or remote.

(If you need to set up network access, that's a whole topic in itself not connected with rsync - look into ssh tunnelling or setting up a VPN)

 

[alexc40]

Hi Jaimie
Thanks for taking the time to reply, I'll go do some more research in to ssh tunnelling and vpn's to try and work out which is right for me.
I wish it was slightly easier, freenas lists offsite replication / snapshots and rsync as some of the main features on the home page but the implementation seems overly cryptic in places :) although as its free I shouldn't complain!

Thanks again!

Alex

 

[JaimieV]

Yeah - you're expected to supply the networking yourself! It's not a self-contained "plug and play" service, that's for sure.