For those of you running Unraid and backing up their data to Backblaze, how are you doing it?

I’ve been playing a bit with KopiaUI but what is the easiest and most straight forward way?

Bonus points if I can have the same “client/software/utility” backup data from non-servers (Windows, macOS and Linux) in my network to said Unraid server.

I don’t want to complicate the setup with a bunch of dependencies and things that would make the recovery process long and tedious or require in-depth knowledge to use it for the recovery process.

To recap:

Workstations/laptop > back up data with what? > Unraid

Unraid > back up data with what? > Backblaze

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    It’s pretty self run, if you’re a bit nervous, try making a folder locally on your workstation and try syncing with backblaze, just to get a feel for it. We all do a few test runs first anyway. Essentially you’ll need to

    1. Install rclone
    2. run rclone config, this will guide you step by step through adding a remote, adding credentials, etc, there’s a full guide here
    3. Try running a copy job for your test folder. It’ll be something like rclone copy /path/to/local/folder remotenameyoucreated:/

    Then go check and see if it showed up in back blaze. Play with some of the flags, like maybe you want -v so it’ll print out everything it does. During testing --dry-run can be a lifesaver.

    One big caveat, make sure you read the manual on the difference between rclone copy and rclone sync, make sure you understand both before choosing on one of them.

    I’m purposely leaving out my script because I think if you’re getting started in scripting you should start small. There’s no big script that will apply to every system. Just try copying one directory to backblaze first on your workstation, then try another, try adding those to a script and running them as a script. Mine really did start as

    #! /bin/bash
rclone copy /mnt/user/myshare myremote:/myshare

    It’ll just grow with time as you add more to it, add caveats, add rules, etc. Our labs are evolving for sure, there’s no silver bullet answer. Good luck, good testing, and ping back here if you have any other questions!

    • lal309@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      My fault! This is exactly what I was going to do as I’m unfamiliar with rclone. My comment about the script was to see how to do checks to make sure the remote is actually available before trying, how to make sure the job ran successfully, how to send a notification upon success/failure, etc.

      I’m pretty novice at bash but I know other languages very well. Concepts apply more or less the same across languages, the only thing that changes in most cases is syntax.

      Anyways, good write up and I appreciate your feedback.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        I’m still working on the amount changed, making sure I’m happy with it before it’s completely automated, but I’m working on parsing the results of summary and --dry-run on a precheck, so if oh, 10% of the files would be changed or more than cancel it, send me a notification, and for that I’d run it manually myself. Still fine tuning and not quite happy with it yet.

        My first iteration was to cherry pick a few “key” files that would be randomly around my file system. Things that I will probably never ever change. This has been proven to work for a long time and honestly has saved my ass because I did accidently wipe out a few files once and this verified that my backups wouldn’t run until I fixed it. It’s a bit dumb but it did the trick for me:

        #!/bin/bash

# check_file takes in a path to a local file and it's "known good hash"
function check_file {
  actual=($(md5sum "$1"))
  if [[ "$actual" != "$2" ]]; then
    echo "ERROR: $1 did not match it's hash value."
    echo "$actual != $2"
    echo "Possible attack.  Exiting"
    exit 1
  fi
  echo "Validated $1 matches the checksum on file"
}

echo Starting Safety Checks

check_file /mnt/user/myshare/mything b04b917c1f66e52adf2722d35f9b51b6
# about 5 random per share

rclone copy /mnt/user/myshare myremote:/myshare

        Like I said, don’t judge too much, but for me it’s a “poor man’s ransomware checker”. If any of those have been modified, do not perform a backup, notify me, and shutdown.

        • lal309@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          The script I’m building is coming up nicely. I have it checking for error codes, logging to a file and sending discord notifications. Next step is to finish up all the rclone copy’s and syncs I want to do and then trying to encrypt the data client side before uploading to cloud. I’ve seen mention of crypt but can’t find it in the official rclone docs (yet).

          • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            crypt is pretty simple honestly, go through prebuild but it’s essentially just sitting on top of another remote. So I usually use the convention {remotename}-crypt. It’ll simply rename and encrypt anything and then pass it into the remove you already set up. A good way to test it is once you’ve copied some stuff over with the crypt set up try to mount it using rclone mount and try to read some of your files, it should be fine.

            Don’t forget to back up (securely, and obviously not on your encrypted share) your rclone config! if those keys are lost than so is your data.