Jail B2 backup strategy

[Martin Aspeli]

I’m after a bit of advice on how to manage backups of jails and their configuration.

I have ten or so iocage jails. Many of them mount “big” folders (eg 300gb of photos) under eg /mnt/Backups.

I want to back up the jails to Backblaze B2. I tried first to set up a cloud sync task in the freenas GUI that synced all of /mnt/NAS/iocage (where /mnt/NAS is the relevant volume). The problem with this is that it also copies the mounted volumes inside the jails so I get not only my custom configured Flickr download solution (that I want to back up) but also the 300gb of photos mounted inside the jail root folder (that I don’t).

Ideally I want to just exclude <jail-root>/mnt. I can do that with rclone natively but not in the UI. I considered creating a jail with a custom cron job, but I can’t mount the jail root inside a jail.

Other ideas on how to do this in a tidy way?

 

[dlavigne]

Did you decide upon a solution?

 

[Martin Aspeli]

No. But from reading various tickets and source code I have some hope that 11.3 will expose more rclone options in the freenas UI which may make it possible to set up an appropriate exclude pattern.