NAS Backup solution?

You were the one making a big deal out of some kind of special snapshotting system. Is that statement inoperative now?

I do not think so. Everything is valid. I am afraid you either lack the capacity or the experience to understand.

I happened to work with Veritas Appliances in one of the projects couple of years ago. Veritas bought it from Symantec. The appliances cost hundreds of tausands. Have nice GUI and various modules for databases, VMWare integration etc. It also uses snapshots to backup systems. And I personally did test complete restore of a whole production environment: 10 blade servers with 40+ VMs, 3 bare metal servers, varios databases, etc. etc. ... I think I know something about backup systems and requirements for use in critical infrastructure. When looking for a system to use at home that does deduplication and can be easily used to restore 2-3 machines I discovered borg. Reviewed, installed tested. Works great. Why not recommend to someone who is asking for backup solution? However the discussion that emerged is for me a bit surprising. I do not want to insult anybody, but ... anyway, I stop here.

You know, at the end may be it is better for you to stick to rsync. Simple minds - simple tools.

BR

Or even 'simple situations, simple tools'

When all you have is a digger, it gets hard to pull one weed from the garden

There seems to be a lot of 'well it worked for me in situation X therefore it's correct for you in situation Y' going on, mostly from people whose life experience is moderately narrow.

In my situation rsync is perfectly fine. I am not enforcing it on anyone else.

In fact is barely worth even mentioning it for fear of getting involved in competitive religions, when you hppen to be at best, an agnostic...

You were the one asking me to look at LVM snapshots, as though they had some relevance to the discussion. Do you backpedal from that now?

Presumably you were relying on the applications themselves (e.g. DBMSes) to recover from inconsistencies in their data. Things are always easier when they’re Someone Else’s Problem, aren’t they?

Fun fact: Andrew Tridgell, who originally created rsync, did his PhD thesis on the algorithm it uses that allows two processes on different machines to compare two files, one on each side, without having to copy the bulk of either one of them over the network to the other side.

Veritas Appliances never had anything like that, did they?

I "like" people who take it personally .... did you measure your blood pressure? I wrote look at snapshots (in case you are not familiar). But yeah ... you somehow take it as personal attack. Pathetic!

Irrelevant.

Nooo never ... they grew up in the jungle. And again irrelevant. If you need to troll ... find a better place.

Perhaps it is hard to accept the fact that someone has different preferences that does not match yours. Childish and stupid.

Andrew Tridgell PhD is an example of western decline. The topic can not be a subject of PhD ... but hey ... with so many PhDs you can now produce just crap. My blood pressure is getting up. Will ignore you personally in the feature. Stay safe in the cave!

Don't feed the troll!

You are the one who seems to be trying to make it personal. I was just pointing out things you said -- things you seem to be trying to distract from, now.

Depending on what's being backed up, I use either duplicity or rclone for online storage. Both of them will back up to S3-compatible object storage.

At work, we have a Synology RS3621RPxs on which MinIO is running in a Docker container to provide local object storage. It holds archived VM data stored with rclone, among other things.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I bought a USB drive and formatted it to ext4 and used rsync to back up the Pi 5.

Don’t forget the tips on how to keep a rolling set of timestamped backups, without needing space for extra copies of files which haven’t changed.

rsnapshot does that for you, using rsync and hard links.

Theo

Sure, these convenient wrappers around rsync handle some common cases with less work. But they still don’t offer the full power and generality of rsync itself.

Also, rsnapshot refers to this article

That page is 20 years old!

The rsnapshot utilitiy will take care of rotating your snapshots (keeping N daily/weekly/monthly etc) which pure rsync won't do.

It looks like it can optionally use --link-dest with a config option:

link_dest 1

If your version of rsync supports --link-dest (2.5.7 or newer), you can enable this to let rsync handle some things that GNU cp or the built-in subroutines would otherwise do. Enabling this makes rsnapshot take a slightly more complicated code branch, but it's the best way to support special files on non-Linux systems.

Theo

Precisely.

Interesting how we were talking about “rsync” before, now it has suddenly become “pure rsync” ...