Make pfsense automatically backup configs to a share drive

I have both pfSense and a Truenas mini running on my home network. I want to ask if is there a way to setup pfSense to automatically back up my pfSense configs to my one of my Truenas shares. It would be great if I could backup those files to a Truenas dataset that is inaccessible to other devices on my network other than the ones used for management.

My only guess is that I’ll have to go into the pfSense/FBSD command line and manually mount an encrypted share to the FBSD operating system then manually use that mount point to backup configs manually but I wanted to know if there was an easier way to achieve this - and also to make the backups regular (weekly) and automatic.

I know that pfSense has the auto config backup service but that only saves my configs on netgate’s cloud service but I’d rather keep my own copies of my configs.

I am running pfSense 2.4.5-RELEASE-p1 and TrueNAS-12.0-U2.1.

In pfsense the config.xml is located in /conf/ and you could probably use SSH with keys to have a cron job send over the file. I don’t do this because our process is to backup the file after any configuration change that we make because that is the only time that file get’s updated.

That makes sense. I don’t change my configs around too often so maybe I’ll do the same.

Hi,

Found this from a Reddit thread.

Don’t know if it will work for you or not

Thanks for the info, unfortunately It requires a windows machine =(

Hey, take a look at this post I just finished writing. It is not perfect, but it can give you some good ideas.

You could schedule a cron job in pfSense to “scp” your config into your TrueNas

Here is the link: https://www.itandgeneral.com/pfsense-backup/

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