Thinking of installing - some questions

Installation
1

Hello

Im a potential new user, and have the hardware arriving next week for a new NAS build. Rockstor looks like it would do a lot of what I need but I have a few questions. I know a lot of this can be probably found out by research but i haven’t been successful.

  1. I want to do a number of things with the NAS. Store media which is non critical, store critical personal data and regularly backup some of my network machines (some folders on those). What is the best way to regularly back up folders on my Macs and Windows to a location on the NAS? should I just use some sort of schedule task for copying or are there any backup clients that support Rockstor?

  2. For the critical data I want to store, I want to be able to back this up to an offsite location, crashplan or Backblaze or Amazon S3 etc. Are there any built in features or plugins (Rock-Ons?) that allow me to do this easily?

  3. If the answer to 2. is no, would it be feasible to set up a Linux VM to act as a backup server, that backed up shares from the NAS to a service like those above? If so, is there any recommendation on the best way to do this?

I plan on using RAID5 with 5x2TB and 1X3TB drive for now, hopefully all i want to do will be achievable.

Thanks for your help

2

Hi

i am in the same situation.

  1. with the Mac you can use Time Machine, that is what i use. don’t use windows so cant help you there.

  2. i am going to test to do a rock-ons of crashplan, i am sure someone already have done it.
    if someone have some other software that the use would be great to know.

i am running raid 5 on 3 drives and one drive for backup.

3

i found a crashplan rock-ons now :slightly_smiling:

Rock-Ons Crashplan

4

I tried it in a VM earlier, didn’t work that well, just sat there installing. Also i don’t understand about the VNC side. is it not all implemented into Rockstor? Im VMing a few other OSes now too see what is the best for me.

Do you use time machine to back up to a share on a NAS?

5

yes i use a time machine share on rockstor. you can see in the documentation how it works

Setting up an AFP share

only used web and terminal when i config the system. don’t know about vnc but the os is based on Centos 7 so i should be possible to install it, maybe someone else know how vnc works on centos and rockstor?

6

regarding time machine backups, also checkout this blog post.

7

I tried it in a VM earlier, didn’t work that well, just sat there installing.

How long did you let it run?
It can be several hundret MB to download.

8

For windows backups you can use File history (8, 8.1, 10) Windows 7 and earlier have a backups built in as well though it is a bit of pain to get to work right.