Backup FreeNAS to Mac (Using CCC)

[peter-swe]

Hi
I'll get straight to my setup and the problem.
Right now I have a NAS with 4 TB of data.
I've set up a MacMini to make backups of the freeNAS data.

The Mac (with USB drives) and the freeNAS are connected directly with ethernet-cable.

I'm running Carbon Copy Cloner and it has been working great. It connects through afp and copies everything. But recently it started to act up.
During the process of making a list of everything its going to backup I get an error in CCC.
"CCC has detected a physical problem with one of your volumes"

And then it points to a file it had trouble with.
Now that message scares me. The backup seems not to be able to continue after a while.

When I try to access the file it had trouble with I can open it without issues. But I worry CCC is seeing something i'm not seeing with my drives in the freeNAS? The freeNAS has not given me any notices about drives failing though.

Is there any test I could run to check for errors? Anyone have other backup solutions for me to try?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

"CCC has detected a physical problem with one of your volumes"

I would look to the CCC docs/support to find out what might cause that to try to get a clue about what it means in your scenario.

Is there any test I could run to check for errors?

Scrubs and SMART tests.

Anyone have other backup solutions for me to try?

What about rsync from FreeNAS to the Mac? Hint: OS X is based on FreeBSD and rsync is already installed, you just need to enable ssh, aka System Preferences | Sharing | Remote Login. Or from the Mac side, run DropSync 3 (available from the Mac App Store).

 

[peter-swe]

Hi. Thanks for your input. Yeah I've read about CCC and the error and it's stated there that it can be bad sectors. But that's all for local drives as far as I can tell.
Scrubs go once a week and SMART-test as well. No errors.

Yeah I haven't had the time to try to get Rsync to work. I feel that it shouldn't be to hard.
I'm reading this:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-copy-files-with-rsync-over-ssh

Say I create a user. "Server" It's Home Dir is at /mnt/raid/home/userServer
Where to now? (Maybe I'm doing this on the wrong side)

I'm thinking, generate ssh-keys on freenas. Add it to mac. Push content using the rsync tasks on freenas.
But don't really know how. :/

 

[peter-swe]

Oh I see there's some more info that I haven't seen in the guide before. I'll make some more noise in here after I read it
Thanks

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Oh I see there's some more info that I haven't seen in the guide before. I'll make some more noise in here after I read it
Thanks

You can set up rsync as push or pull, depending on what makes sense for you. I recommend reading the rsync docs and getting it working at the command line before you try to automate it.

Regarding the message from CCC, can you tell whether it's the source or the destination that has a problem? Maybe the mini's hard drive is failing, or maybe the AFP performance of your FreeNAS is sometimes slow enough to lead CCC to seeing operations timing out.

 

[Glorious1]

You might try doing the backup over ethernet instead of wifi if you're not already.

 

[peter-swe]

Hi
The mac and the freenas-server are connected directly to each other via ethernet.
I've set up a simple test with RSync on my mac and pulling from Freenas , not over ssh as that seems well... I don't need it.

However. Being a swede, I have multiple files and folders using the characters å ä ö.
For example I have this object called "Molekylnivå"
Rsync doesn't find it on freenas and deletes it in my previous backup.
"deleting Molekylniva?\#212 - 01/multi/Mesh-molekylniva?\#212-01-_object_2_0029.png"
But then it finds it on freenas and copy it correctly.
"Molekylnivå\ - 01/multi/Mesh-molekylnivå-01-_object_2_0029.png"

This is going to be trouble because it's going to think it needs to copy it every single time.

Any clues?

 

[peter-swe]

So I found some information about rsync on mac being outdated. And the old version was not very good at handling other than english letters.
I made an update from rsync 2.6.9 to 3.1.0 (followed this guide http://selfsuperinit.com/2014/01/04/an-updated-rsync-3-1-0-for-mavericks/)
And yeah. It still deleted those files and pulled them once again. But now it showed me correct file names.

Did a new pull again to be sure it did it again. And yeah. Still deletes it.
I don't know where to go now to get rid of the problem.

//Peter

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Try giving rsync a suitable locale conversion using the --iconv parameter. The syntax is --iconv=local,remote. If you enter the locale command on each system you can get a hint at what might be the correct parameters to use, or you could just try something like --iconv=UTF8-MAC,UTF8.

 

[Glorious1]

Interesting - I never new about locale. It seems there is also one "sv_SE.UTF-8" that might be appropriate in this case.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

This was something I ran into when using rsync to backup a website that includes some content in Spanish.

 

[peter-swe]

Hey guys
I never got CCC to work properly again. But using Rsync from the Mac i was able to run my backups (even though it's manually for now)
my whole rsync command look like this ( maybe it will be helpful for someone )
/usr/local/bin/rsync -avzh --iconv=UTF-8-MAC,UTF-8 --delete --progress 'user@192.168.0.10:"/mnt/MainRaid/server/Clients/"' "/Volumes/Month/Backup Server/Clients/"

So the --iconv=UTF-8-MAC,UTF-8 works like a charm. Thank you for that!

Now the next part for me will be to figure out how to do this automatic. Preferably inside FreeNAS as it has the ability for automation built in.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Earlier I mentioned DropSync 3, which is available from the Mac App Store, and can be set to run a sync on a schedule. Just an idea.

 

[peter-swe]

Hi
Thanks for the reminder. I thought that it DropSync 3 was using the shares to copy files, much like CCC. But I see now that it works with ssh and that's nice.
I'll give that one a try tonight.
Thanks again.