Need verification on Crashplan... plans.

[Phastor]

I've been getting some bits of info from /r/unraid and thought I would run by some thoughts here. I'm still waiting from some more items to come in before I can do my build, but I'm seeing that as a good thing as I'm still testing things out with the trial and learning what I can.

 

When I get my build done, I'm going to be running a 3 disk array, 2 data 1 parity, and plan on backing that up onto an external USB drive. A second drive will be added later so I can rotate them to have an off-site backup. I would back up all shares except for a "backup" share that my workstations back up to. I will likely be doing the backups with the Crashplan docker. 

 

Initially, I was planning to back up the shares in /mnt/user so I could get everything across all drives, with the exception of a "backup" share that my workstations will be backing up to. However, I'm thinking of the event of a drive failure, where parity fails as well. Theoretically, that drive will be backed up, but I won't know what data to restore since I won't know exactly what I lost on that drive. I thought I could use Crashplan to do a blanket restore of everything and tell it to not restore any files that already exist. This way I would essentially only restore what disappeared when the drive died. However, the only restore options Crashplan has for existing files is "Overwrite" or "Rename". It doesn't seem like there's an option to tell it flat out not to restore anything that already exists. I don't want it doing that unnecessary work of overwriting files that already exist.

 

It was brought up on /r/unraid that I could have Crashplan watch and backup the actual individual disks instead the shares (/mnt/disk1, /mnt/disk2, etc. instead of /mnt/user). That way if a disk dies, I can just restore that whole disk and know that I got back everything that disappeared when the disk died and not have it go through trying to restore stuff that's on the good disks. Further, in order to exclude the "backup" share that my workstations back up to, I would just have to tell Crashplan to exclude the folders tied to that share on each individual disk.

 

Is this a safe and sound way to do things? They seem to think so over at /r/unraid--I just want to pull opinions on it from multiple sources.

[boxer74]

I like this idea but if you had to do a full system restore to a new system with a different disk config, you'd have to manually restore each disk's contents one at a time to your new user share. At least I think this is how it would work.

 

For now, I think I'll leave it backing up the entire /mnt/user share. Would only really need to do a massive restore in the event of a major loss and then to overtime everything is not a big deal. I did it once before and it worked well. Actually balanced all my data out among-st my disks will restoring.

[Phastor]

1 hour ago, aberg83 said:

I like this idea but if you had to do a full system restore to a new system with a different disk config, you'd have to manually restore each disk's contents one at a time to your new user share. At least I think this is how it would work.

 

For now, I think I'll leave it backing up the entire /mnt/user share. Would only really need to do a massive restore in the event of a major loss and then to overtime everything is not a big deal. I did it once before and it worked well. Actually balanced all my data out among-st my disks will restoring.

 

Yeah I think I'll be doing the same. I've been testing backup and restores on the individual disks, moving files around with unBalance and whatnot and then backing up again to see how it behaves. Files that should be in certain restore points on certain disks aren't there and all kinds of weird things are happening. Too scary.

 

I just wish Crashplan would let me do a blanket restore over everything while only restoring files that are missing. It just seems like a ton of unnecessary wear and tear on the drives and a lot more time consuming to be forced to do all those writes for files that are already there.

Edited July 4, 2017 by Phastor

[boxer74]

 

Yeah I think I'll be doing the same. I've been testing backup and restores on the individual disks, moving files around with unBalance and whatnot and then backing up again to see how it behaves. Files that should be in certain restore points on certain disks aren't there and all kinds of weird things are happening. Too scary.

 

I just wish Crashplan would let me do a blanket restore over everything while only restoring files that are missing. It just seems like a ton of unnecessary wear and tear on the drives and a lot more time consuming to be forced to do all those writes for files that are already there.

Agreed.

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[Phastor]

9 hours ago, aberg83 said:

 

Agreed.

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Apparently it's been a requested feature. Hopefully they add it sometime. It's a basic function that I don't think I've ever seen missing from a backup utility before.

Edited July 4, 2017 by Phastor

[Phastor]

Just some more observations while playing around with this.

 

I started a clean backup of /mnt/user and noted the size of the backup. I then added /mnt/disk1 and /mnt/disk2 and ran the backup again. The backup was almost instant and the size didn't go up at all, but the file's in the backup were present under both /mnt/user and the individual disks. I'm assuming that's deduplication at work.

 

Knowing this, I could theoretically back up /mnt/user and the individual disks at the same time without the backup being any larger. This would give me the option to do a full restore of /mnt/user or restore only the contents of a failed disk, whichever the situation called for.

 

However, this just seems like a lot of hassle to make sure that each disk has the right folders selected. There's also the issue where if I were to move files from one disk to the other with unBalance or MC. Crashplan will mark the files as deleted on the original disk even when they were just moved. I'm afraid this would cause those files to be deleted from all locations within the backup when it does the cleanup by removing deleted files. I think that's what was happening to me before where I said files weren't where they were supposed to be after moving them.

 

I think I'm still going to stick with just backing up /mnt/user. Seems to be the safest route despite the issue of having to restore everything if I lose just one disk.

Edited July 4, 2017 by Phastor

[boxer74]

Thanks for playing with this. I'm still thinking about my options.

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[boxer74]

Still debating whether to roll crashplan for my unraid to unraid offsite backups (have a server I can place at the office), or to use rsnapshot or rsync with --link-dest for a versioned incremental backup option.

 

I much prefer the GUI and ease of use of crashsplan, but partial restores are problematic as discussed above.

 

What does everyone else think about this?

 

Sometimes I think about going to FreeNAS with ZFS snapshotting and replication... but unRAID is just too easy and bullet proof. Been using the file integrity plugin and feel that my data is reasonably safe.

 

Thoughts?