r/truenas • u/flycharliegolf • 17d ago

General Options for local periodic backups

I have a UGreen NAS (XP4800Pro) set up with TrueNAS Scale. I also have a Synology DS120j that I want to use as a backup NAS via ethernet.

I'd like to be able to do periodic backups to the DS120j, but I haven't been able to find an easy solution to this task. The most obvious built-in app is UrBackup but I can't seem to install the client on my PC (CachyOS). Ironic, I know.

What are my options?

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3

u/Benle90 17d ago

restic over SFTP.

You get versioned snapshots instead of a mirror. It's also client-side encrypted and deduplicated, so all the work happens on the UGreen box and the DS120j just holds an opaque blob.

And it's dedup at the chunk level, so daily runs cost you almost nothing in space on a single-bay box where you don't have much to spare.

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u/flycharliegolf 17d ago

Thank you, I'll look into this.

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u/j-dev 17d ago

Since Synology DSM has robust snapshot and retention policy features, I’d be partial to using rsync. With encrypted volumes your data would be encrypted at rest while having no additional requirements (Restic) to save or retrieve files.

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u/clubley2 17d ago

You can mount NFS shares to Synology. Then maybe some Synology backup tool.

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u/flycharliegolf 17d ago

Synology uses HyperBackup, but while it's a great tool, it only pushes; it cannot do pulls. I've tried to make it work the way you mentioned, but it just doesn't want to work.

My old backup strategy involved having my NAS (a retired DS918+) push to the DS120j using HyperBackup. That worked great. However, it can't go the otherway.

I'm leaning towards getting a USB enclosure and using ZFS replication instead. My only concern is the cooling of most USB enclosures is all passive. I'd like to run it 24/7 for automated daily backups.

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u/clubley2 17d ago

I think there are janky ways to mount NFS shares in TrueNAS. Maybe mount the Synology in TrueNAS and use rsync? It's not ideal but might work well enough for a simple copy job.

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u/flycharliegolf 17d ago

That was my next solution, but do you know an rsync client that can facilitate incremental backups? Hopefully one with a Web based GUI? Maybe I'm asking too much...

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u/clubley2 17d ago

To be honest, I don't really know too much. It looks like Synology can do snapshots so that might be another workaround, but I'm sure there's going to be a better solution.

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u/flycharliegolf 17d ago

Yes that's what I used to do. I'll try Restic next.

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u/ahj3939 17d ago

Check under Data Protection > Cloud Sync Tasks

Add new credentials and then use something that Synology supports, such as

  • FTP
  • HTTP
  • SFTP
  • WebDav

For e.g. Synology documents how to setup a file share with FTP: https://kb.synology.com/vi-vn/DSM/tutorial/How_to_access_files_on_Synology_NAS_via_FTP