Full Backup of a Share Folder in the Greyhole Pool

talvasta · 22. Juli 2014

Hello All,

Greyhole works great, and I've had no problems with the plugin for OMV. However, for added piece of mind, there are certain folders (Photo, Documents, etc) that I would like to backup to an external hard drive. The problem I have with both rsnapshot and rsync is I point them to the shared folder to be backed up and because rysnc and rsnapshot both work with the filesystem, it only backs up the symlinks that are inside the folder on the one drive where the shared folder was created.

I would like be able to backup the full data set then have the incremental backups that rsync and rsnapshot do. That way if, God forbid, the whole greyhole pool or my entire system crashes I can still get to the backed up data on the external drive. (plus I like sleeping in my bed which would never happen again if I lost all my wife's photos).

Any help setting up a full backup would be greatly appreciated, if it requires command line, no problem, I'll just need a little extra hand-holding with it.

Thanks

tekkb · 22. Juli 2014

Uh, what do you think Greyhole is for? Why don't you just change your settings to 2 copies. Then Greyhole will backup the files to another drive in the pool automatically.

talvasta · 22. Juli 2014

I agree that is what Greyhole is for and the very reason I use it. But if I lost all our family photos, I think hara-kari would be the only acceptable penance

tekkb · 22. Juli 2014

I would probably do 2 copies on Greyhole and a usb external backup occasionally with really important things like photos.

talvasta · 22. Juli 2014

Totally agree. Is it possible to automate the occasional external backup and make them incremental?

Davidh2k mentioned something in this post, but unfortunately, I don't understand the command line prompts. http://forums.openmediavault.org/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2437

ryecoaaron · 22. Juli 2014

Use the rsnapshot plugin. You would have to leave the external plugged in all the time though.

tekkb · 22. Juli 2014

I would use the usbbackup plugin. It would backup or synchronize a shared folder. There are a lot of ways to do things.

talvasta · 22. Juli 2014

No problem leaving the external drive plugged in all the time. The only problem is it appears that rsync/rsnapshot only backs up the symlinks from the source folder and not the actual data since it is distributed between 3 disks that are part of the greyhole pool. After a day of backups the disk has only 3MB of space used when it should be over 150GB.

I have not tried usbbackup, will it pull the entire data from the share or just backup the symlinks like rsync?

tekkb · 22. Juli 2014

Hmm... test it. I would like to know the answer. There is an extra options setting. If not maybe an option can be added to follow symlinks.

Code

-L, --copy-links
              When symlinks are encountered, the item that they point to  (the
              referent) is copied, rather than the symlink.  In older versions
              of rsync, this option also had the side-effect  of  telling  the
              receiving   side   to  follow  symlinks,  such  as  symlinks  to
              directories.  In a modern rsync such as this one, you’ll need to
              specify  --keep-dirlinks  (-K)  to get this extra behavior.  The
              only exception is when sending files to an rsync that is too old
              to  understand  -K — in that case, the -L option will still have
              the side-effect of -K on that older receiving rsync.

talvasta · 22. Juli 2014

Sorry, I posted before I saw your code box about -L. I have read this in my searching for a solution but wasn't sure how to apply it. Where would I add this -L variable in the rsnapshot or rsync gui? And would I simply add "-L" or does it need something more?

As for usbbackup, I will try it as soon as I get home and I'll post back what I find. Thanks for your help and patience.

tekkb · 22. Juli 2014

ryecoaaron · 22. Juli 2014

You can put any of these arguments in the long arguments box and it will use them when executing the job.

Code

-l, --links                 copy symlinks as symlinks
-L, --copy-links            transform symlink into referent file/dir
     --copy-unsafe-links     only "unsafe" symlinks are transformed
     --safe-links            ignore symlinks that point outside the tree
-H, --hard-links            preserve hard links

tekkb · 22. Juli 2014

He means in the "Extra options" box.

ryecoaaron · 23. Juli 2014

Zitat von "tekkbebe"

He means in the "Extra options" box.

Thanks I was reading the name in the source code.

talvasta · 23. Juli 2014

Ok, so for the command-line challenged like myself. I put "-L" (without quotes) in the Rsync long arguments box when adding a backup with the rsnapshot plugin and it did a complete backup of the share folder following all the symlinks. I'm sure this would be the same in the Extra options box on rsync and usbbackup. Thanks again tekkbebe and ryecoaaron for your help

Jetzt mitmachen!