How best to back up a Windows PC to a FreeNAS/TrueNAS disk pool?

On Holiday said:
Veeam community edition agent works with TrueNAS CIFS/SMB for sure. Assuming you've whitelisted the IP for CIFS/SMB access?
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Never assume anything where I'm concerned! :D

I just created the SMB share in Truenas, mapped it and entered the credentials for the associated account I set up at the same time in Truenas, and Windows is happy to use it.

However when I put the address for the nas by name OR by IP it doesn't work when using those same credentials to authenticate. So I can't get as far as creating the job.

The nas is currently connected directly to the PC is is backing up.
 
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I’ve been using Paragon Community edition for years after the built in Windows Backup failed me.

Pretty sure it can backup to network locations. It’s pretty much set and forget.

www.paragon-software.com

Free Data Recovery software | Paragon Backup & Recovery Community Edition

Reliable backup and recovery tool for windows 10 with advanced options of restoring files, folders and os. Incremental and differential backup of the whole system.
www.paragon-software.com www.paragon-software.com
 
MichaelAwkward said:
I’ve been using Paragon Community edition for years after the built in Windows Backup failed me.

Pretty sure it can backup to network locations. It’s pretty much set and forget.

www.paragon-software.com

Free Data Recovery software | Paragon Backup & Recovery Community Edition

Reliable backup and recovery tool for windows 10 with advanced options of restoring files, folders and os. Incremental and differential backup of the whole system.
www.paragon-software.com www.paragon-software.com
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Thanks, I've binned off Syncback and I'm giving this a go.

It seems to do what I want, but it doesn't have any kind of logging that I can see in the free version, and the progress of a backup is very unclear.

I selected 6 volumes with a total of 1.5TB to back up, and it has been sitting at 10 - 20 minutes remaining for a while now, when it will most likely take a good few hours in reality, and the backup size hasn't been increasing, so I think it is going to fail eventually. Ideally it would have more intelligent error reporting and told me what the holdup is by now.

Its also a shame that it doesn't support synthetic full backups, so I have no option but to do an additional full backup every few backup cycles.

But I will persist and see what it does. :)
 
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Update on Paragon...

The backup completed!

So I tried to do a file restore as a test, and... There is no way to restore from a backup on a network location. It only shows me local disks...

There is also no way I can see to edit a backup job.

Honestly astounding. Uninstalled...

I was however able to easily connect to the NAS using identical details that were throwing errors in Veeam.

Why is this so difficult. :o
 
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Trying Macrium reflect free edition now. Fingers and toes crossed... :p

edit; OK this seems VERY promising so far. A lot of disabled features in the free version, but I have set up fulls and differentials, running the first test full now.

It also seems to be by FAR the fastest solution I have tried so far, the transfer rate is pretty amazing considering it is using SMB, and despite the disabled features, still the most feature rich.
 
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Macrium wins!

Fastest backup time by far, can do full drive images, no issues at all accessing backup files from a network location, and when you try to restore files from a volume it simply adds a virtual drive to windows explorer so you can essentially view your drive as it was, and copy out what you need, and then unmount the image.

Extremely happy with that solution, wish I'd gone with it in the first place! :cool:
 
Armageus said:
Robocopy then :D


(Somewhat in Jest, but also not - because our software/servers, and backup needs at work are so bespoke - I ended up writing something in VB6 to pull files into the correct places, and then just backup at different intervals with scheduled tasks that run robocopy)
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Ooof sounds messy. Curious what your bespoke requirements are though.
 
Macrium reflect very good for our needs and its free for windows PCs in corporate editions we used it a lot for cloning disks.
i keep meaning to give Veeam a go but time is always the issue.
 
Semple said:
Ooof sounds messy. Curious what your bespoke requirements are though.
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A combination of full logical daily backups of MySQL (mysqlbackup piped directly to GZip to compress ~200gb to ~15gb), that then have to be matched with binary log files for each day (that are flushed at 5 minute intervals), whilst also pulling in a copy of an MDB file at 6 hour intervals.
Copies of source code folders, and various other key folders are also backed up daily.

Essential we can restore things easily to a specific day, and on a database level even to 5 minute granularly if required.

This "daily" folder is replicated to a 2nd backup server, as well as being backed up to a Bitlocker encrypted SSD (1 for each day of week) taken off site daily

(which automating this to be "foolproof" is also a challenge in that only 2 people have the password to restore this, but several people are trusted to plug it in, and unplug it once they receive an email to say the backup is complete - also assigning the same static drive letter to 5 of the same USB drives is a minor challenge)

Various tools are involved including: USBDLM.exe, RemoveDrive.exe, CMail.exe, nircmd.exe
 
We were using RDX cartridges for the off-site part, for the shock proof/ruggedness, but when it came to replacing a failed cartridge, rugged external SSDs were cheaper and much faster in similar capacities so made sense.

A week's worth of SanDisk Extreme pro ssds also takes up much less room on my shelf at home :D
 
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