TrueNas Scale Backup Strategie

[Tech-Chrizz]

Hi together,


I have a question related to TrueNas Scale and hope someone of you can help me out of my backup headache.
I am a newbie if it comes to Truenas Scale because i was using until now mainly Microsoft products or ready NAS Systems from different vendors.
Independent of the infrastructure i was always using a backup strategy

For example: daily - incremental, weekly - full, monthly- full .....

That allows me to deal also with a corrupted backup file on the backup system because than I simply could go back to the next full
Backup and restore the data from this backup. I am working already more than 20 years in this branch and having more than one full backup
rescue me already several times.

This is something I’m missing currently on my test TrueNas system because here I can use of course replication as a backup functionality but this
is not allowing me to store more than one copy of my data an protect me of losing my data because of a corrupted replication.
Right?

How you are dealing with your TrueNas file Backup? Which functionality or "APP's" you are using to back up your System and Files?

I would like to have as usual three copies of my data at the end. The first one on the productive system. The second one on me QNAP NAS as daily/weekly/monthly backup and the third one on my cloud storage but also as a backup. Maybe one more thing from my side if it comes to the cloud backup:
If I understood it correctly I cannot use cloud sync in this case because it is not a useful backup if the file on the target will be also deleted if I delete it on the source.

Thanks in advance

Cheers

Chris

 

[Arwen]

Not sure how you can incorporate your QNAP as your incremental target. I think RSync can do what you need. But, it may be tricky. I think something like this might work, but please do your own research & tests for confirmation;

Source - /mnt/tank
Destination - qnap:/backup/tankfull
Incremental - qnap:/backup/tankinc

rsync -aAHSXx --backup-dir=rsync://qnap/backup/tankinc/ /mnt/tank/ rsync://qnap/backup/tankfull/


My backups use removable disks, rotated through 3 disks, formatted to ZFS but using RSync. After each backup I use ZFS snapshot to store multiple backups on the same disks. Meaning if I change or delete a file months ago, it might still be in my 3 disk rotation via the snapshots. When the disks get full, just before a backup I remove the oldest snapshot(s) until enough space is available.

 

[Tech-Chrizz]

Hi and thank you very much for your answer.

Hmmm, but with a snapshot you are storing only one time the same version of a file. So, imagine the snapshot where your file is stored is corrupted.
This file in this specified version is not existing in any other snapshot so simply said this file is lost. This is the reason why it makes sense to store more than one full backup of all data. Of course, it is an edge case, but it can happen. Usually, I do backups like this with Veeam or Acronis but I wanted to find out if TrueNas Scale offer also this functionality without 3rd vendor software.

 

[Arwen]

I have 3 full backups. As I said, I have 3 disks that I rotate through. So unless I add a file, backup once, then delete the file, my next backup will catch the change and add the new file. Eventually it will exist on all 3 backup disks.

But, you are right, the ZFS snapshots are not backups. They simply handle version control. While similar to backups, not quite the same.