I’m in the process of planning out my home backup system now, and I’m finding aspects of it a bit confusing. I’m using KeePassXC and Syncthing to great effect to keep my KeePass database synced across my phone, desktop, and FreeNAS, but Syncthing seems to work best for smaller files. I’d like to regularly backup important sections of my home directory (like software development projects) as well as wholesale image backups of my desktop, and laptop to my FreeNAS server.
I’ve seen that FreeNAS has quite a few backup plugins, like Tarsnap, and BackupPC, Bacula, and BRU Server, is there any one in particular that stands out as the best choice for my use-case?
Also, where does R-Sync fit into this backup paradigm? Is it in the same vein as Syncthing as a tool for keeping files and directories in sync? If so, why do all these other syncing tools exist if R-Sync performs the same task?
Is there a particular video you could direct me to that does a deep dive into the best backup solutions, how they work, and pros / cons?
@drowsy I’m looking at something similar for my home and personal work files. I was working on setting everything up on some old Raspberry Pi’s hooked up to some external 500gig drives. You don’t mention what operating systems home directories you are planning to back up, but you might want to look at rdiff-backup. It is a CLI program that creates a simply way for you to do incremental backups and because it is a simple CLI command it would not be hard to write a bash script that would run in crontab. I believe it is also using rsync too to make the connection between client and server. It seems stable and available on all platforms I have found it in the Raspbian and Ubuntu repos.
Since I’m not running FreeNAS I’m not sure that is a great option for you. I would look at which of the FreeNAS solutions have clients available on the OS’s that you intend to back up regularly, and that might make your decision easier. I would be interested in hearing about your final working solution since I’m attempting to do something in a similar way.
I am using Syncthing to keep 90,432 files, 5,310 folders totaling to 128 GiB of data in sync from my my office and off site. I run it on my local workstations and on my FreeNAS systems in a jail. It works great with low overhead. But I don’t use it on any of my mobile devices as I don’t really have a need to.
I been trying to use Syncthing between a unraid server to a off site FreeNas server to backup all the things.
Unraid seems to run Syncthing just fine, FreeNas has been nothing but problems, I have gotten 8T sync up so far. it seem Syncthing is not liking lots of files and Terabytes of data. I even tried running Syncthing on a windows box to sync the files over SMB to the FreeNas server.
Here is what happens in a jail or the windows box after a few hours FreeNas become unresponsive from the web UI and from the console I can hit enter and lines move but it ever refreshes the screen.
I have not found anything else that seems to fit the bill for remote backup.
I found out Zerotier is built in the FreeNas, so i played with it to make a tunnel and maybe do a Rsync, but its really really slow about 300 to 700KB’s
The FreeNas server is running 11.2-U4.1 with two X5650 and 20 GiB
Your question(s) here perfectly match why I signed up for this Forum. I believe I’ve watched every one of Tom’s excellent videos related to backups, yet not seen this precise use-case addressed. Since I too am quite new to this world, I was looking for a fairly simple web ui that can set up backups of the pcs on my LAN to my TrueNAS Scale server. Everything I’ve encountered within TrueNAS apps (including TrueCharts) seems far too complex for someone only a year into this space. I had hoped BackupPC would be my solution, but, again, setup is largely CLI (and not simple CLI). At this point, I’m simple not sure which direction to turn. I am running Syncthing, but it does not seem like a best-practice way to do backups. Any advice/guidance is appreciated.
This post started 4 year ago and my backup solution is still the same, I use Syncthing. There are just not a lot of full image backup solutions out there that are open source, free, and really easy to use. There are plenty of paid commercial programs out there that you can point to a share on TrueNAS.
Another option out there for full image backup is Synology which does have a nice and easy to use backup system.
Thanks for this response. I assumed I was “missing something” in thinking the same thing, i.e., that there are not a lot of such FOSS backup solutions.
Since skill is not an issue for you, why not Rsync as a backup, instead of Syncthing? Your comment makes me think I should not necessarily even see using Rsync as the goal, after further learning.
For me it’s about real time backups of my data and having my notes and other critical data backed up the moment it’s saved. Syncthing does a great job of that and handles keeping previous versions of the files if that is needed.
