Re: NAS Backup solution?

On 23/06/2025 08:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Rsync is an excellent backup tool. Not the least because it contains an exact copy of the source.
 Restore is simply a question of using it in reverse.

I set up my backup system specifically for Raspberry Pi's using (at the time) unreliable SD cards, and making recovery to a new SD card as quick as possible.
Each time I create a new Raspberry Pi I set it up and then take a copy of the SD card with dd on to Networked storage. Each night this image is then mounted and rsync commands issued to update any changes files in each partition. That way if a card fails, I have a day old image I can dd straight to a new SD card and have the Pi backup and running. The only mildly involving bit was specifying the list of exclude directories of things which don't need to be backed up.
At the start or each week and month, I use zerofree on the latest image to clear any unused space so it compresses well with gzip, and keep those compressed versions in case any SD card corrupted creeps in to the daily image, so I can restore to a week or month ago if needed. I also keep the last backup before changing major OS versions in case of things like Bookworm updates causing problems.
All the stuff on the network storage is mirrored to several other on site and off site discs, again using rsync.
I've got nice graphs produced by the logs, so I can see that last night my 16 active Linux Raspberry Pi's backed up a total 1402MB of changed data in 2188 files in 425 seconds. The last time I updated the OS on all of them in May it was 25GB, 389,436 files in 1:01:04.
---druck