I’ve been intending for quite some time to setup an automated or at least a thoughtless
one click backup procedure from my family members PC’s to a file server.
Now if you put files directories in the place where we are going to rsync to, and run the command we’re going to setup, those new files directories will be deleted.
So in this case, we have a master / slave model.
You can also set it up so that no files directories are automatically deleted. That’s not what I’m doing here though.
Links I found helpful
rsync man page
SSH man page
Ken Fallon’s “A private data cloud” podcast
I wanted to setup the script to mirror the local disk or several directories on it to the file server.
So the local disk would be the master.
I often use the file server as an intermediate step to pass files around my network.
So I just need to be aware not to put files in the directories that are going to get written to on the file server, but use alternative ones instead.
Otherwise they will be overwritten when rsync runs.
Objective
Provide a regular (on the hour) or one click sync of files (once the fileserver is on a decent UPS) from:
- My external drive to the file server.
- My wife’s thumb drive to the file server.
- /media/EXTERNAL/Applications to MyFileServer/MyShare/ExternalBackup/Applications
/media/EXTERNAL/Documents to MyFileServer/MyShare/ExternalBackup/Documents
/media/EXTERNAL/media/Books to MyFileServer/media/Books
/media/EXTERNAL/media/EducationalMedia to MyFileServer/media/EducationalMedia
/media/EXTERNAL/media/Images to MyFileServer/media/Images - /media/disk to MyFileServer/WifesShare/disk
——via SSH
Until the file server is being powered by a UPS I can set up shutdown scripts for,
so when we’re not about, it will still shutdown gracefully on power outage,
we’ll be running the rsync scripts manually.
As I don’t want an hourly script syncing data to the file server when the power gets cut.
Why? because RAID arrays often get destroyed by being written to when they loose power.
Currently if we loose power the file server is on a small UPS and we can halt any sync scripts interacting with the file server before she goes down.
We can manually shutdown the file server gracefully.
You need to take good precaution with rsync as you can erase data easily.
I like to use the –dry-run or -n until I’m happy that the command I’ve got is going to actually do what I think it is.
You can use -v the verbose option with levels of verbosity up to -vvv for debugging rsync. Generally -vv is heaps.
Archive mode -a is actually -rlptgoD. Check the man page for details.
–delete delete extraneous files from dest dirs that are not on the source.
–force will delete directories from dest even if not empty
It’s a good idea to setup some test directories for source and dest.
You can also (if you want to be extra careful) mount your dest and source or just your dest directory read only.
Put a copy of some files and directories in each, and make some changes to source and/or dest.
Then once you run the command, you can check that the sync has done what you expected.
My initial test command after I created the rsyncTestSource and rsyncTestDest dirs:
rsync -vva --dry-run --delete --force /media/EXTERNAL/rsyncTestSource/ /media/EXTERNAL/rsyncTestDest/
Perform checks.
Then remove the –dry-run.
Perform checks again.
Now to file server:
You’ll have to, if you havn’t already, setup SSH on your file server.
You can follow the steps on my post here for that if you like…
The initial command I used:
rsync -vva --dry-run --delete --force -e 'ssh -p 2222' /media/EXTERNAL/rsyncTestSource/ myUser@myFileServer:/mnt/FileServer/myUserDir/rsyncTestDest/
You can specify the -e option followed by the remote shell.
rsync must be installed on both source and dest machines.
By default FreeNAS already has rsync, as does a standard debian install.
Then remove the –dry-run
Perform checks again.
Now for the first real backup, add the dry run to start with:
rsync -vva --delete --force -e 'ssh -p 2222' /media/EXTERNAL/Applications/ myUser@myFileServer:/mnt/FileServer/myUserDir/External-Backup/Applications/
Then remove the –dry-run.
Perform checks again.
I added a collection of these commands to a file (rsync_EXTERNAL_to_fileserver) to run for each directory and saved to my ~ directory.
Turn the executable bit on.
Make sure owner and group is correct.
chmod 750 rsync_EXTERNAL_to_fileserver chown MyUserName:MyGroupName rsync_EXTERNAL_to_fileserver
Add a command drawer to the task bar.
Add a Custom Application Launcher to the drawer that points to the rsync_EXTERNAL_to_fileserver file.
You can even add an image that makes sense to the drawer.
Mine looks like this, with 1 command launcher.
Ok, it’s 2 clicks for me, but you don’t have to use a drawer 🙂
There are also other ways to do this.
Like this video.
Binarymist 
Leave a comment