Automatic configuration backup to cloud

[RonRN18]

In my FreeNAS setup, my bootup media is a USB thumbdrive that plugs into a USB port (conveniently located directly on the motherboard, inside the case). I was greeted with the following email upon waking yesterday:

The boot volume state is ONLINE: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.

It was after researching are realizing the problem was with my thumbdrive that I realized that I did not have a configuration backup saved anywhere. After getting a new thumbdrive and installing FreeNAS on it, I had to rebuild everything. Thankfully, my two ZFS RAIDZ1 volumes were recovered without any lost data but I had several plugins setup. In some regards, it is good to start the process from scratch... correct mistakes I made before, but it took a lot of work setting up the plugin jails. When I re-installed FreeNAS, it took me to an install wizard and it got me thinking. It would be nice to have a process in FreeNAS that periodically saves a configuration backup and automatically uploads it to a cloud storage site, like Dropbox or Google Drive. Then, when installing FreeNAS, have one of the first options in the wizard to go to your cloud account and get one of the latest configuration backups. My current backup file is 323KB in size; that is relatively tiny! Transferring that small of a file to a cloud site would take very little time and takes very little space but it would save a TON of time and worry. I'm guessing there may be some way to hack up a solution for this if I got to the command-line and set up a cron job but this is something I think would be useful to many people, not just me.

 

[Artion]

I think it would be useful. Personally i use two thumb drives for the boot device in mirror. But the ability to have the config saved in the cloud or in a dataset periodically would be great.

 

[dlavigne]

FreeNAS already backs up your config daily. From http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_system.html#general:

Save Config: used to save a backup copy of the current configuration database in the format hostname-version-architecture to the system being used to access the administrative interface. It is recommended to always save the configuration after making any configuration changes. Note that while FreeNAS® automatically backs up the configuration database to the system dataset every morning at 3:45, this backup will not occur if the system is shutdown at that time and the backup will not be available if the system dataset is stored on the boot pool and the boot pool becomes unavailable. You can determine and change the location of the system dataset using System ‣ System Dataset.

 

[icsy7867]

I know this is sort of hacky, but I created this article a couple of weeks ago:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...google-drive-automatically.41199/#post-262520

It uses the gdrive binaries to access and automatically upload your conf file to your google drive. I currently have it setup to automatically back up once a week.