johnnychicago
Dabbler
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2016
- Messages
- 37
Hello --
So I've been setting up Freenas on an existing machine. Coming from Linux, I've used LVM on software raid for the best part of a decade. This is a home setup.
I am getting along reasonably well with the basics, no pressing need for support there. The documentation is quite exhaustive, so I am doing ok.
What I am after is how to set up my backup solution. I am lazy, so the backup just has to work automated. Here's what I used to do: a second machine, not raided, just LVM'ed (to save on drives), on the network, and I rsynced my mounts daily on to that one, using hard links to the previous day's directory. Keeping the daily directories for two months, sunday's for half a year, and first sunday of the month for two years. I found that quite nice to be able to get files from long ago, and I've done a total restore from it, and was happy with how that went too.
Starting new, I was figuring to do it better and put the backup box on the internet (precisely: at my parent's). I was figuring I'd 'prime' it with initial backups on the LAN and then move it out. My daily changes are small enough to make this work, it would take maybe an hour every night - two if I do housekeeping.
I am currently experimenting with periodic snapshots and replication tasks. That goes pretty easily, my test backup machine gets the snapshots pretty instantly. Cool stuff.
The bit I am currently missing is the organisational one.
* How can I choose which snapshots are being backed up? For convenience I'd like to have regular snapshots during the day, but would really only need to back up one nightly.
* How am I going to purge unwanted snapshots from the remote machine? As far as I can see currently, I can either remove them based on the main NAS deleting them (e.g. after 2 weeks), or they will stay forever, in very fine granularity. Or I can delete them manually. Is this a problem that has been solved? I figure a small shell script would allow me to take out according to some granularity like the above mentioned, but I'm new around here, and it will take a bit of a learning curve to come up with such script.
* For added complexity, I'd like the backup machine to sleep when not needed. I could wake it up from the BIOS at midnight, and I understand there's ways to upgrade a dynamic DNS entry. However currently I am not quite sure how to approach putting it back to sleep. I figure no established SSH connection for 20 minutes or so would be a decent criteria.
* for the main NAS (as well as the backup, come to think of it) is there a smart way to create shares with the snapshots? I'd imagine something that would give me a share with every existing snapshot being a subfolder named for the snapshot date, and I could just mount the whole shebang and look for a given file in all its versions in the different snapshot folders.
I would enjoy getting some directions - I feel somewhat insecure, since I'm quite set in my ways on my previous environment, and this feels new and not yet comfy to me. Am I having a good approach here, or are these things done differently? I'm quite ok with changing my ways, my problem is that I am currently not quite sure what to search for.
Thanks for reading.
So I've been setting up Freenas on an existing machine. Coming from Linux, I've used LVM on software raid for the best part of a decade. This is a home setup.
I am getting along reasonably well with the basics, no pressing need for support there. The documentation is quite exhaustive, so I am doing ok.
What I am after is how to set up my backup solution. I am lazy, so the backup just has to work automated. Here's what I used to do: a second machine, not raided, just LVM'ed (to save on drives), on the network, and I rsynced my mounts daily on to that one, using hard links to the previous day's directory. Keeping the daily directories for two months, sunday's for half a year, and first sunday of the month for two years. I found that quite nice to be able to get files from long ago, and I've done a total restore from it, and was happy with how that went too.
Starting new, I was figuring to do it better and put the backup box on the internet (precisely: at my parent's). I was figuring I'd 'prime' it with initial backups on the LAN and then move it out. My daily changes are small enough to make this work, it would take maybe an hour every night - two if I do housekeeping.
I am currently experimenting with periodic snapshots and replication tasks. That goes pretty easily, my test backup machine gets the snapshots pretty instantly. Cool stuff.
The bit I am currently missing is the organisational one.
* How can I choose which snapshots are being backed up? For convenience I'd like to have regular snapshots during the day, but would really only need to back up one nightly.
* How am I going to purge unwanted snapshots from the remote machine? As far as I can see currently, I can either remove them based on the main NAS deleting them (e.g. after 2 weeks), or they will stay forever, in very fine granularity. Or I can delete them manually. Is this a problem that has been solved? I figure a small shell script would allow me to take out according to some granularity like the above mentioned, but I'm new around here, and it will take a bit of a learning curve to come up with such script.
* For added complexity, I'd like the backup machine to sleep when not needed. I could wake it up from the BIOS at midnight, and I understand there's ways to upgrade a dynamic DNS entry. However currently I am not quite sure how to approach putting it back to sleep. I figure no established SSH connection for 20 minutes or so would be a decent criteria.
* for the main NAS (as well as the backup, come to think of it) is there a smart way to create shares with the snapshots? I'd imagine something that would give me a share with every existing snapshot being a subfolder named for the snapshot date, and I could just mount the whole shebang and look for a given file in all its versions in the different snapshot folders.
I would enjoy getting some directions - I feel somewhat insecure, since I'm quite set in my ways on my previous environment, and this feels new and not yet comfy to me. Am I having a good approach here, or are these things done differently? I'm quite ok with changing my ways, my problem is that I am currently not quite sure what to search for.
Thanks for reading.