Onsite / offsite backup approach

General
1

Hi all,

I’ve been reading through the various threads on backup options for Rockstor and doing a bit more poking around on the interwebs to look into other options. I think I’ve come up with a reasonable solution for my needs but was hoping to get some feedback from the community to see if there are better options or a more straightforward approach before I start getting down to work.

My setup at home is 3 Windows laptops and Rockstor running on a PowerEdge T20 with 4TB storage in Raid1. Compared to a lot of setups I’ve seen, I don’t have a huge amount of storage to deal with but ideally I’d like automatic backups from each laptop to Rockstor, and then automatic, incremental, and encrypted backup of selected Samba shares from Rockstor to a cloud location like Google Nearline or Amazon Drive unlimited.

UrBackup (http://www.urbackup.org) looks like a good option for getting data from the laptops to Rockstor with a UrBackup server running, especially since there was some brief talk about this becoming a RockOn and they appear to have a very active community as well. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and supports some pretty cool features.

I spent a lot more time figuring out options for getting backups from Rockstor to a cloud location with the criteria I had though, and in the end am leaning toward HashBackup (http://www.hashbackup.com). It looks like it should be able to install underneath Rockstor and it has support for cloud connections, encryption, compression, incremental backup, etc.

Other options I considered were rclone (no encryption although could (maybe?) use something like EncFS but that’s an extra step and more setup), Tarsnap (gets a bit pricey), Arq (only runs on Windows or Mac), and Duplicati (mentioned in some threads here, but looks like development is pretty slow).

So, any other options I haven’t considered? Any big issues you see? What are others doing for personal backups?

Cheers,

Geoff

2

I’m using Crashplan. A lot of people don’t like it as it is java based and uses a lot of RAM, about 1 GB per TB on average. I have about 4 TB of data backed up there. Cost is $60 a year to backup to their server, unlimited data. I have gigabit fiber, but tend to max out at 50 Mb/sec to and from Crashplan.

I installed Crashplan from the command line and manage it from my Windows PC.

If you install Crashplan on your Windows PC, you can enter a code to back up to your Rockstor installation, easy as pie. This is free (whether or not you pay for their cloud storage.) However, Crashplan will NOT back up a Crashplan backup, so you can’t pay for your Rockstor and tell it to backup additional back ups (does that make sense?) However, I suspect that if you mounted a directory with EncFS and told it to backup the encrypted folder, it’d work just fine.