Snapshot backup scheme with two ReadyNAS

[yoh-dah]

One of the key features of RAIDiator 2 is the ability to use the new incremental backup capability in conjunction with snapshots. If you're not familiar with snapshots, it's a read-only image of your original share frozen at the specified time you took the snapshot. You can be making more changes to your original share, but your snapshot still looks like your share at that given time. This is important especially when you backup data.

Backup scenario
For this example, we have two ReadyNAS, one used for normal day-to-day file serving, and one delegated as a backup. We'll call the two hosts "Primary" and "Secondary". Our example will backup snapshots from Primary to Secondary on a daily basis, however we want the ability to restore from up to a week's worth of changes. For simplicity, let's use the share [work] on a Primary that will be your backup source and the backup target will be on Secondary in the share [backup].

Schedule snapshot
You can do this by first scheduling snapshot to take effect every day, let's say at 2am in the morning. Go to the Share/Snapshot tab and set up snapshot once daily at 02:00, and click Apply. This sets up your snapshot schedule.

Create backup jobs
Now go to the Backup tab, and we'll create 7 jobs (job1-job7), all backups occuring from share [work-snap] from Primary, i.e. //Primary/work-snap. Note that we append "-snap" to the share name because we will be backing up the snapshot.

For destination, select the [backup] share on the ReadyNAS and enter a path. For path, specify Sun for job1, Mon for job2, ..., Sat for job7.

For schedule start time, enter 02:05. This allows the snapshot to be in place right before the backup job starts. Select Sun for job1, Mon for job2, etc. so that this backup job only occurs on that specified day.

For backup option, specify First time for "Schedule full backup". This way after the first backup, all backups will be performed as incremental and thus will be much quicker.

Additional comments
As with an backup job, you should first run it manually to make sure connection, access, file permissions, and capacity utilization all work as expected before deploying the backup schedule.

[Jim Kring]

It would be nice if it were possible to create multiple snapshots on a single ReadyNas. For example, if the -snap folder contained all of the snapshots (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Etc.). Having only one snapshot is very limiting for a robust backup scheme. And it should not require 2 ReadyNAS and multiple shares/snaps to implement a robust backup scheme.

For example, take a look at this link: Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync

thanks for listening,

-Jim

[quagswag]

While I agree with Jim that multiple snapshots would be desirable I would have thought it beyond the scope of customer the ReadyNAS is aiming at.

For instance an 8 snapshot scheme from HP on the MSA 2000 costs around £600 for the licence. (This is SAN based and works at block level rather than file level).

I would also suggest that the Daily, weekly, monthly model is not how snapshots are generally implemented; most companies will be looking at multiple snapshots to cover systems on an hourly basis or better, longer term solutions are usually handled by D2D or D2D2T. Multiple snaps are taken up by companies with a need for a short 'Recovery Point Objective'.

Using a 2nd ReadyNAS also makes sense as this is not for snapshot, this is the equivalent of Volume Copy or Cloning. The only way of achieving this within a single ReadyNAS would be if there are separate volumes on it.

Just my two pennies... I'm not working for Netgear, in fact I am a HP Enterprise Storage Trainer, bigging up the ReadyNAS is probably considered a bad thing You should all ditch them and invest in Storage Servers

QuagSwag

[cgalpin]

First, new to the forums, very happy customer. I installed a ReadyNAS NV in my mom's small office a few years ago and couldn't be happier with its performance and reliability.

I too had a need for keeping a snapshot history for their critical quickbooks files though. I was very pleasantly surprised to see ssh access is allowed so I enabled it and installed rsnapshot which does this beautifully. I'm doing them locally but it can also send them to a remote rsync server as well.

Anyway, I wanted to share this as well as point out one problem which is the bsdutils package is installed and lists /usr/bin/logger as one of the files it provides, but this does not exist so I had to disable syslog support for rsnapshot which is a shame. I tried a few things but was unable to reinstall the bsdutils package to get logger installed.

I don't want to rock the boat so figured I'd leave it be. But if anyone knows how to get logger installed I'd appreciate it.

thanks,
charles

[ngb]

There are some things that are not clear in the instructions posted here:

- Do I set each daily backup job to do a full backup the first time?
- So I've set up my Sun, Mon, etc. jobs, Sunday runs first and does a full backup into the Sunday folder. Will the system be smart enough to realize that it only needs to do incremental changes into the Monday folder (having done a full backup into Sunday)? The alternative would be for each daily backup to do a full backup once, thereby taking up 7x the space of the original data, which would be unacceptable.

Thanks,
Nate

[atz6975]

Hi Yoh-dah,
thanks for the tip...of the iceberg?
Actually I kind of have the same doubts as ngb.
Do we end up with 7x the full amount of data?
Have you tested this scheme and can you confirm that each day contains only the delta with the last full backup.
If not, I really suggest this thread should be updated...
Still, I'm really interested in such a scheme that could be done from frontview.

Thank you.

[atz6975]

Any news on the potential heptuplication (correct?) of data?
Thanks.

[mdgm]

I think this method will keep seven copies of your data. You can only have one snapshot at a time. Backing this up to another device, should mean all the data is backed up.

You can use the Community Add-on Rsnapshot which has more advanced features. It will not keep multiple copies of your data. The snapshot will keep a copy of the changes, but will appear like it's got all your data.

See:
Rsnapshot for Sparc
Rsnapshot for x86

I would like to learn how to make an add-on and do a Frontview GUI for this when I have the time, but it would of course be more feature limited, but useful for those who like to just use Frontview to do it and don't want to mess around with config files that may take a bit of reading to understand.

Any help with places to look to point in the right direction to learn about stuff that may be useful for how to do this would be much appreciated.

[LithiumP4]

I'm trying to set up rsnapshot (http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=194203#p194203) on my ReadyNAS 1100 to back up the other ReadyNAS 1100 on my network, but NOTHING is working.

Here's the setup:
Both ReadyNAS 1100s are running RAIDiator 4.1.6
Regular NAS: 192.168.1.16
Backup NAS (running rsnapshot 2.1): 192.168.1.14

I tried changing the config file, but I'm not really sure how it should be set up. Here's what I have so far:

backup rsync://admin:password@192.168.1.16/CAD/ localhost/CAD/
(I'm using tabs instead of spaces in there)

With this setup, I'm getting the message "ERROR: At least one backup point must be set. rsnapshot can not continue." What am I doing wrong? Is there any way to test connections without having to wait 1-4 hours every time a change is made?

I've tried changing the hourly backup interval from 6 to 24 to no avail. It still keeps backing up every 4 hours. It seems like rsnapshot isn't even reading the config file at all. Could it be that I need to install PERL? How/where do I get that?

Thank you so much for your help

-Thomas