NAS Backup solution?

rsync.

Forget all BS like rsync etc. except you don't care about disk space. Borg backup is the best as it uses deduplication.

BR

rsync

David

rsync has this nifty option called “--link-dest”, which lets you create incremental backups that look like full backups for restoration purposes, but with files that were unchanged since the last backup deduped to reduce disk space.

I run multiple backups on multiple machines and OSes from cron using rsnapshot, which is just a script sitting atop rsync. Easy to configure if you're used to that sort of thing. Stores a single copy of a file across multiple backups via inodes. Don't know if that rules out any filesystems, I am archiving to HFS+ and ext4.

Tom

Not sure about HFS+ (Is that still in use??), but hard-linking via the -- link-dest option is a standard POSIX thing.

rsync is good tool, but it is not a backup tool, while Borg Backup is a perfect backup tool. the mentioned functionality is meant to reduce traffic and save time more than reduce disk space. And I do not know how a restore would look like with rsync. With borg it is a one liner. I leave the decision with the OP

It most certainly is a backup tool, among many other functions.

It does that too.

rsync just creates a mirror of the state of the filesystem. Restoration is done with regular file copy commands -- e.g. an rsync in the opposite direction.

Rsync is an excellent backup tool. Not the least because it contains an exact copy of the source.

Restore is simply a question of using it in reverse.

well, I use rsync and borg and borg is much better. Decision what to use is yours!

I don't think Apple quite advertises it this way but as a matter of practice HFS+ is still the preferred filesystem for any external disk on a (current-era) Apple system. APFS is out there and mentioned more prominently, in my experience, but that is really for internal SSDs.

I have a friend who put APFS on a spinning internal drive (while working at Apple) with somewhat dated hardware and saw inferior performance (to HFS+). He reported this to the guy who designed APFS whose response was, "Of course." I have done modest testing of APFS on external SSDs and it was markedly slower than HFS+ on the same drive.

Tom

As if we need your permission.

And you can rerun the rsync operation to the same destination, and confirm that it does nothing (i.e. nothing got left out). And for extra paranoia, you can specify the --checksum option, which forces it to reread everything, just to confirm that the copy was bit-for-bit exact.

Linus Torvalds once described HFS+ as “complete and utter crap”

Interesting. In the Linux world, we run the same filesystems (e.g. ext4) on SSDs as we do on spinning media. The SSDs are supposed to have elaborate firmware to make them behave just like disks; does the new Apple filesystem not interact well with this firmware?

Linux also offers specially-designed filesystems, with wear-levelling built into their storage-allocation algorithms, so that they will run efficiently on raw flash media.

I use rsync regularly to backup remote systems using ssh, where known_hosts and authorized_keys are correctly populated (eg): rsync $OPTIONS remotehost:/ localdir/ to copy a whole remote host to a local directory system.

I can't see a way for borg to do this. Am I wrong?

why trolling. You have opinion, I have opinion, whats the problem?

I also do this with an rsyncd on the far end ...

It wouldn't be the first time a latest and greatest couldn't do the basics.

Generally that you only tolerate yours :-)

-- Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.

Richard Lindzen

do you need a psychiatrist? I can recommend a good one.