Thoughts about backup strategies for a heterogeneous multi-OS scenario (including backups while running and optional remote synchronizing) - Comments and additions are welcome

Hi there,

After I got OMV running on two Raspberry Pi I'm going forward to develop my backup strategies.

It's planned that all Devices (1 Notebook running Windows 8.1, 1 Hackintosh running Mavericks and Windows 7, 1 Cubox-i4Pro running OpenELEC and several Raspberry Pis) will use a single "local" OpenMediaVault machine for backups.

My plans for the "local" OMV are like this:
- The Windows machines are actually running Duplicati for daily incremental backups of critical files and do full backups of these files every month. At the moment I have this all set up with the backup files being stored on an USB thumbdrive connected to my FritzBox. In the future the backups should be stored on the OMV station. So it would just be like changing where Duplicati sends the backup files to - if I stick with Duplicati.

- The Windows machines should also be able to be backed up fully (while running) once a month so a complete restore is possible. At the moment I do a full "offline" backup using a Windows 98 BartPE CD running Acronis Trueimage and manually backup everything to a USB HDD. What tools (or combination of tools) can provide this kind of backup on the OMV? The goal of this backup would be to have an image of the complete system partition to be used by recovery tools for a full restoration of the system partition.

- The Hackintosh running Mavericks should use TimeMachine for complete and incremental backups on the OMV. This should be relatively easy to accomplish using netatalk and AFP I think (hope).

- The OpenELEC box has it's own backup addon that can store/read the archives to/from an FTP or Network share. So this sounds relatively easy to accomplish with OMV.

- Regarding the Raspberry Pis, I create my backups manually at the moment: Reading an image from the SD-Card, compressing it into an archive of a reasonable size and storing it on the USB thumbdrive attached to my FritzBox via a Windows machine. The "perfect solution" for this would be to have complete backups that are taken periodically/automatically and can restored at any time while the system is running. I'm thinking about using duplicity or Bacula for the tasks but I don't have any experiences with these tools.

My wishlist for the backups on the "local" OMV would look like this:
- If possible I want as less user interaction as possible - especially regarding the daily backups. So these should be done automatically and scripted.
- If possible I want as less tools involved as possible. For example if it's possible to accomplish all my backup needs with a single toolchain (like for example using Bacula for doing the Windows and Linux backups) this would be my preferred solution.
- It's okay if the full backups (of the Windows and Raspberry Pi machines) are not automated and involve other tools than the daily backups. But if they can be done with the daily tools, also it's very welcome.

If all these things are accomplished for the "local" OMV machine my next goal would be synchronize all backup data with a a second "remote" OMV station that's based at another location. But I think I'll post that in another thread as it would be too much for now

Do you have any suggestions, tips on how to get my backup plans running? Or are there much easier and more elegant ways to accomplish my needs?

Thank you a lot for any input regarding this.
Best regards!

You could be right, Aaron.

I simply got enough "spare" RPi around so they would be my number one choice for the task - though I'm waiting for something like Compulab's Fitlet to be available (here in Germany).

Are the OMV configuration files exchangeable for various platforms? Meaning if I switch from a RPi to another system can I export my old OMV configuration and import it into the new OMV installation on another machine (and hopefully keep all data and disk configurations in place)?

I also thought about using Windows Backup to do the job but it seems as if it can't restore system-backups while running Windows. Tools like "AOMEI Backupper" seem to be able to do the job "live" and just need one reboot to restore system-relevant files on rebooting - plus it can create recovery-media if your system doesn't boot at all.

Thanks for the info, raulfg3!

In the meantime I'm thinking about replacing the "local" RPi with a Banana Pi (or maybe a Banana Pro) for a performance boost.
I could sell one or two of my spare RPi and get a BPi instead...

In combination with a decent SATA HDD this should push performance a bit, I guess, but I doubt that a Banana Pro would do much of a boost over a "usual" Banana Pi though.

Thanks for the input, David.

From a technical point of view I thought the 1Gbps eth of the Banana Pi in combination with a dedicated SATA port should do a better job than even the RPi2 (which is still crippled to 100Mbps eth via the USB controller that has to handle both, the network data and the USB data more or less parallel when writing to the USB-HDD over the network).

Or am I totally wrong here?

Zitat von davidh2k

Erm, I'm not 100% certain that this still applies to the RPi2...

As the RPi2 uses the Microchip LAN9514 Controller for both USB and eth it's very likely that the restriction still applies for this version, too.

The Banana Pi uses the A20 SoC for USB connectivity and a dedicated Realtek RTL8211E/D for eth - as far as I know.

To keep this thread a bit up to date here's what I accomplished so far:

My plans for the "local" OMV are like this:
- The Windows machines are actually running Duplicati for daily incremental backups of critical files and do full backups of these files every month. At the moment I have this all set up with the backup files being stored on an USB thumbdrive connected to my FritzBox. In the future the backups should be stored on the OMV station. So it would just be like changing where Duplicati sends the backup files to - if I stick with Duplicati. => Done! It was a bit nasty to get Duplicati running the way I wanted (thanks to Win8.1 and it's terrible UAC/"elevated Administrator rights") but it workes quite well.

- The Windows machines should also be able to be backed up fully (while running) once a month so a complete restore is possible. At the moment I do a full "offline" backup using a Windows 98 BartPE CD running Acronis Trueimage and manually backup everything to a USB HDD. What tools (or combination of tools) can provide this kind of backup on the OMV? The goal of this backup would be to have an image of the complete system partition to be used by recovery tools for a full restoration of the system partition. => Nothing done so far.

- The Hackintosh running Mavericks should use TimeMachine for complete and incremental backups on the OMV. This should be relatively easy to accomplish using netatalk and AFP I think (hope). => Done! After changing the netatalk/AFP share from the SD Card to the "real" HDD I had some issues regarding some user rights but after deleting the user, setting up a new one and changing rights back again it workes quite well. The speed was very low, though (22GB took around 2h to finish) but I'm not sure if this is related to the way OS X does the backups.

- The OpenELEC box has it's own backup addon that can store/read the archives to/from an FTP or Network share. So this sounds relatively easy to accomplish with OMV. => Done! I use a SMB share to receive the backups from OpenELEC. I might change it to NFS if I get the time.

- Regarding the Raspberry Pis, I create my backups manually at the moment: Reading an image from the SD-Card, compressing it into an archive of a reasonable size and storing it on the USB thumbdrive attached to my FritzBox via a Windows machine. The "perfect solution" for this would be to have complete backups that are taken periodically/automatically and can restored at any time while the system is running. I'm thinking about using duplicity or Bacula for the tasks but I don't have any experiences with these tools. => Nothing done so far.

My wishlist for the backups on the "local" OMV would look like this:
- If possible I want as less user interaction as possible - especially regarding the daily backups. So these should be done automatically and scripted. => Works very well with Windows (Duplicati) and OS X (Time Machine)
- If possible I want as less tools involved as possible. For example if it's possible to accomplish all my backup needs with a single toolchain (like for example using Bacula for doing the Windows and Linux backups) this would be my preferred solution. => I think I will stick to tools I know that are working rather than having tools I'm not sure of. But I will test Bacula if I get the time.
- It's okay if the full backups (of the Windows and Raspberry Pi machines) are not automated and involve other tools than the daily backups. But if they can be done with the daily tools, also it's very welcome. => As I didn't do anything related to full backups this is still open.

After all I'm really astonished how fast one can set up a backup station with OMW! Thank you all for the really good work on this project and all its plugins.

Best regards.