What filesystem to use to backup data stored on OMV and be able to mount and access the drive with Windows 11.

MikeInOr · 13. November 2022

I have been running OMV for a few years now and love it. Last week my 43TB SAS RAID drive died and I pooped myself. I replaced the SAS RAID controller and was able to get my RAID back online. I have ordered a Toshiba 16TB SATA drive that I would like to use for backing up my main data store. I love OMV but live in a Windows world and have several Windows workstations. What is the best way to do automatic backups to the 16TB drive and be able to read it on a Windows 11 workstation? I do not need historical file access, whatever is on OMV at the moment I would like mirrored on the Windows readable drive. Once a day backup drive syncing should be plenty.

I have read posts that NTFS drives can be mounted on OMV but really only for reading because NTFS does not support ACL's.

I have read the ext4 drives can be mounted on windows with "extra software".

What app should I use to do my periodic sync from my data drive to the Windows readable backup drive? RSync? Something else?

Is there something I have missed?

Should I just put the 16TB drive in a Windows workstation and use a ROBOCOPY job to keep it in sync with my OMV shares over the network?

I am pretty much a novice with Linux but can follow online tutorials well enough to get most apps running. I am currently running Docker/Portainer, PLEX, CloudCMD, Transmission-openvpn, HomeAssistant and zwave-js in containers on my OMV server. My OMV hardware is an old AMD workstation motherboard with 64MB DDR3 RAM, some AMD processor, 10Gbs Mellanox nic, Avago / AMI / Megaraid SAS raid controller with 8tb SAS drives in RAID 5 with a hot spare. I am currently running OMV5 but will upgrade to OMV6 if needed.

P.S. I do currently keep multiple backups of all my important files like photos and personal files but the thought of losing my entire PLEX media library was not a happy thought.

Thank you for the informative, non condescending replies!

geaves · 13. November 2022

Zitat von MikeInOr

Thank you for the informative, non condescending replies

I'll try my best, the big problem like most windows users, and I am one, is getting out of the mindset that your files must be accessible via windows and most windows users believe that NTFS is a must.

TBH if the use of NTFS is a must then why use a Linux based server just deploy a windows machine and use storage spaces, but to debate that is just too long and would give me a headache

So lets look at this using windows, so you've installed your new drive on your windows workstation and formatted it to NTFS, what you need to do then is create a share lets say you call BackUp or OMVBackup (note no spaces). On OMV install the remote mount plugin and mount that share on OMV then you can use rsync as local to backup to your NTFS drive, you're going to have to sort out permissions. When I tested this route I set the Everyone user to full control on my windows workstation, not the best option but I was only testing.

Another option is to use syncthing in docker, this works for a lot of users but I never found it that intuitive.

So what do I do now, I have a backup drive in OMV formatted to EXT4, the shares on that drive mirror my share names on OMV albeit with back added to the end of the share name, but these backup shares are not mapped to SMB, I can see them on OMV but not on the network.

I then use rsync in the early hours to run on each share, but only every week, you can set up rsync to do daily.

Then comes the what if or the yeah but, what if my omv crashes and burns, well because I boot from a flash drive I also use the usb backup plugin weekly, set to sunday pm then on monday I write the image to another flash drive.

Yeah but, what if the m'board goes into meltdown, well if the drives are ok I'd attached the backup drive to a Linux VM on my windows workstation and check it's integrity, then curse and swear that I've got to buy a new server

The point I'm trying to make I suppose is that is doesn't matter if you use NTFS or EXT4 so long as the drive is accessible then so is the data. There is no right or wrong way it is what you are comfortable with.

One of the fun things to do to understand Linux is to deploy a VM on your windows machine using VirtualBox or even Windows Hyper V provided your workstation supports virtualisation. I have OMV on mine for testing, if I f* it up it doesn't matter just delete it and start again and that goes for any Linux distro. One option I was looking at when I read your post was iSCSI, could you setup the initiator on OMV and the target on Windows, I've done it the other way round when I was a sysadmin and thanks to OMV's iSCSI target plugin it worked great. But the other way round will require more reading you're never too old to learn.

MikeInOr · 21. November 2022

I appreciate the considerate informative reply!

My 14TB drive came in. I decided to format it as NTFS and put it into my workstation. It took a little more than a day to copy 10TB of media files from my OMV server over to this new backup drive in my workstation. This was over a 10Gbs ethernet link and the drive speed was definitely the limiting factor in the transfer. Copying all of my photos to a SSD in the same machine is easily 8 times faster.

Doing a sync with robocopy (copy any new data to the new drive and get rid of any deleted data on the new drive) takes about 15 minutes for rcopy to compare the directories with only a handful of new media files to copy over. I think I will stick with this simple easy solution and just schedule the robocopy job on my workstation.

P.S. I did load a Zorin and a Mint virtual machines on my workstation. Good idea!

What filesystem to use to backup data stored on OMV and be able to mount and access the drive with Windows 11.

MikeInOr 13. November 2022

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