Our Nethserver installation has been working flawlessly for more than 6 months : not a single problem whatsoever.
A huge improvement from our previous system (SBS Server 2008)!!
It’s funny… I sort of miss rebooting the server after some major updates.
We are currently using Nethserver Backup module to backup our system to a FreeNAS server (HP Microserver Gen 8) exposing an NFS share. This has been working very well, with a weekly full backup and daily incremental save.
I am now planning to implement an off site backup (the FreeNAS system is in the same server room) but I do not want to alter the current backup setup as it is working well.
My first idea was to rsync the whole /var folder to an external USB disk, but it fail once tested it.
Any idea about a possible solution?
P.S. I recently upgraded my home internet connection to a full 100MB fiber, so I may consider to run the backup from home using my VPN access.
I’d rsync /var/lib/nethserver.
Pay attention to format the usb stick using ext3.
You can rsync over ssh to a system in your house, it’s easier than to a usb stick.
Done.
After some initial struggle (the mounted USB disk would interfere with the Backup running at night…) I managed to rsync the whole /var/lib/nethserver.
Very fast and efficient.
Now I have an off-site backup : once a week I bring to the office the disk and I update it; than back home.
Unmount USB disk (may need to wait for buffers to be flushed):
umount /mnt/backup-dalmec
Check that USB disk has been unmounted :
mount
One word of warning : if the rsync process runs too long and overlaps with the backup process, the backup will fail. In normal conditions this is not a problem as rsync is quite fast, but it forced me to stagger the first backup in several steps/days.
just some feed for thoughts, only rsync the /var/lib/nethserver, might not be enough since some additional modules put a link in /etc/backup-data.d/ to save their data with the backup module.
Not yet, but I did test a provider in .nl that gives 1TB owncloud storage for free. It is accessible directly through webdav, so if you mount the webdav location and do a backup to the mounted webdav directory, you have an offsite backup. In such I case I use duplicity for backup since it can create encrypted backups. I wouldn’t want to store my offsite backups unencrypted.