Backing up external drives

[Mike83]

I back up my flash drive onto a portable external hard drive, then backup that external hard drive to FreeNas, however each time I just copy the contents of the external drive to FreeNas, since the contents of the external drive change as I add, delete or update data on it I don't know what has changed and what hasn't since my last backup to FreeNas.

Is there any way I can backup only the data that has changed, so it should take a lot less time? Is it something FreeNas can do or will I need a 3rd Party program?

 

[DrKK]

Well,

You could certainly use a third-party mirroring solution.

For example, if the external drive is mounted to Windows, you could use "syncbackfree" by 2brightsparks software. It will, on whatever schedule you want, backup only the files that have changed, or are not currently on the backup directory. etc.

 

[cyberjock]

Umm .. you aren't supposed to backup the USB stick. It's in the FAQ and manual that you should just backup the config file. The backup file you have, even if not corrupted, isn't always bootable when you restore it. Bottom line, take the easier path and backup the config file and sleep well knowing if things go bad you just make a new USB stick and restore the config file. There's a thread around here with a script for automatic nightly backups so you don't even have to worry about maintaining backups.

 

[DrKK]

That's not how I read his post.

I thought he has "a" USB drive that he happens to back up to an external drive, and for whatever reason, he wants to back up the whole external drive.

 

[Mike83]

Yeah that's what I meant DrKK, I will have a look at that software. I just thought maybe FreeNas might have something that could do similar. I'm a bit of a FreeNas noob, its confusing, I have a basic file server running which I store things on and I did manage to get Plex running but Users/groups and disk based options are baffling, I only did my first ZFS scrub the other day, it was fine. I have ZFS+1, 5 2TB disks giving me 8TB (7.1TB) in a hp micro server.

 

[leenux_tux]

I do something similar and use two different programs, depending on which way I am copying data. Take a look at "robocopy" and "rsync". The nice thing about robocopy is that (providing you are copying from Windows of course) there are no extra things to setup, you just run "robocopy blah blah blah" to your network drive (FreeNAS) or locally attached USB drive (I can provide some examples of switches I use) and it will copy the files/folders you specify. The default for robocopy is to only backup files/folders that have changed, which is what your looking for ? You can even get it to mirror a folder (careful with this one, it removes stuff from the destination).

rsycn does just as good a job (I would guess many folks would argue a much better job) as robocopy but to be able to use it properly I found I needed to install "cygwin" on to my laptop, then install rsync inside cygwin as it's not installed by default.

I find robocopy is very useful and once you get used to it's syntax you might find you rely on it a lot.

 

[TheSmoker]

You can try a combination of deltacopy on your workstation together with rsync server of freenas.

 

[leenux_tux]

I tried deltacopy on my laptop and couldn't get it to work. I have seen posts by others (on here and other sites) about this program it is seems to have a some fans so yes, defo worth a look

 

[Mike83]

Hi

I was trying for a while to get robocopy to work, it did but it just seemed slow, but I think it was because I was using it to create all files at the destination. Firstly I copied over the files (just using copy and paste in Windows) then changed nothing on my external drive, running robocopy around 25% of files were updating when they shouldn't have been. Yet others were showing "same". I think it might have been something to do with the timestamps on the files? It was showing something like 09:13 > 09:14 and that was the time at the time! It always seemed to be the same files updating too.

So I thought I would let robocopy create the initial image on the destination drive instead of copying it over using Windows copy and paste, It took a lot longer but it still updated files it wasn't supposed to. Also using /mt seemed to make it slower, I have a fast PC and 1gbps network connection.

I was using this : Robocopy G:\ "\\FREENAS\Data\Backup\2TB Portable Hard Drive" /MIR /W:10 /V /Z /ETA /XD G:\$RECYCLE.BIN "G:\System Volume Information"
attrib -s -a -h "\\FREENAS\Data\Backup\2TB Portable Hard Drive"

Anyway I decided to have a look on portable apps site and found FreeFileSyncPortable which works exactly like I wanted it to, its a simple looking program but very good I think!

 

[leenux_tux]

I'm sure there are other tools/utilities out there as well. It all boils down to what does the job, what your comfortable with and (important for me anyway) if I can remember the syntax and just type in a command on the fly whenever I need it.

There are a few other switches that might be of use and they are to do with "file classes" where you can hard code inclusions or exclusions of "newer" or "changed" versions of files. This could be the issue you were seeing where files you knew hadn't changed were copied. Problem is, if the file was touched by a program then the access time would have altered

 

[Mike83]

Thanks, I don't think I would have remembered the syntax in that robocopy command! It was running in a .bat file anyway. It might have been something to do with the newer or changed files, no program interacted with the source files though as I ran robocopy straight away after it finished the first time.