How Do I Backup All My Servers???

Running backups is always a challenge, whether you work in Enterprise, Small Business, or even just in your HomeLab. Today, I'm getting my entire server stack backed up to a new NAS, extending incremental copies to 2 months, and (most importantly) automating the entire process.

But first... What am I drinking???

This twist on a Gin Martini caught my eye for being a little more on the citrus-y side of things, thanks to the addition of Orange Liqueur. 1oz Dry Gin, 3/4oz Dry Vermouth, 1oz Orange Liqueur, and 2 dashes of Angostura Bitters. Shake, then strain straight up in a martini glass. I added a lemon zest, and that really helped bring all the flavors home.

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Music:
Bossa Antigua by Kevin MacLeod

[icantthinkofaname]

"What's your backup solution?" Prayers

[whirledpeaz]

Good that Jeff isn't clumsy like Linus, Open glasses of Liquid near the Open server chassis.

[jmonsted]

There's absolutely no reason this video arrived just after the basement flooded, right? :-P

[NickMoline]

love how your data sets are named with the registry numbers of the Valiant and Defiant

[TheJamice]

Stumbled across your channel as I'm starting to build my own home lab, have to say, your videos are super informative and easy to follow, keep it up!

[adamw]

I picked up 2 Chenbro's because of you....one for a new plex build and one just because I wanted to you and your amazing channel

[jrucker]

My backup setup is very similar to yours. Pro-tip: change the theme on your backup truenas gui, so it's immediately obvious which system you're looking at.

[Darkk]

If both TrueNAS machines have the dual 10gig SFP+ cards in them you could make use of LAGG to increase the throughput between the servers. Since the traffic is being handled on the same switch it's not going to affect your network that much. Plus added bonus of fault tolerance if one network cable or port should go bad.

[jamesnisly]

I'm definitely looking forward to video covering how you decide to handle off-site backup as I'm in a similar boat.

[markkoops]

Suggest for off site, duplicate the server you just built, have it replicate the backup server on site initially then move it to a friend's house and ssh tunnel back

[nadtz]

Watching this again is just making me remember writing little scripts to Cron. So nice having these appliances to do this stuff with now a days. Finally got all the bits for my first server, now to start saving for some 10gb networking hardware and a second server.

[fastedu]

Hi Jeff, fantastic reviewo on servers, not only entertaining but so information packed that its a super pleasure to listen to you and a great source of knowledge you share - not stops barred.

[digitalsparky]

For off-site backup, you can backup to backblaze b2 - they can even send you a drive array push the bulk of your data to, so that you don't have to upload it all over the internet. I recommend giving that a go :)

[lrider]

You might want to keep an eye on the temperatures of those HP (made by QLogic) 10Gb adapters. I recently put two of those same adapters in my homelab servers. One of them hit 108C and shut down! After a bit of reading, I discovered they have known overheating issues. I replaced them with Emulex-based cards and the thermals are much better (one running at 47C, the other at 57C as I write this, with no other changes to the configuration).

[claystorm]

SysAdmin of a small to midsized local construction company here. Currently we have two ReadyNAS's onsite that are roughly mirrored (say roughly as our security footage is only on one NAS, which is fine as it comes from a different box). We then have a third NAS at our ISPs Colo Facility that the local data gets backed up to nightly. Our two physical servers which are mirrored are also backed up nightly to those NAS's and we also use some national cloud backup providers for that data as well.

As for those ReadyNAS boxes, we were original customers to Infrant Technologies before Netgear bought them about. We bought replacements 4 years ago and while they've been pretty rock solid, when I replace these, it will probably be with TrueNAS on some barebones Dell or other boxes. Netgear seems to have ReadyNAS in maintenance only mode these days, which is sad to see.

[mistakek]

For my backups, I run Synologys Active Backup For Business, along with snapshots every 5 mins. AB4B is amazing, I can do a bare metal restore of any machine in my network, and along with the snapshots, and full shared folders backup, to the backup NAS, along with uploading to the cloud, I really have piece of mind of my data. Synology's AB4B is the best backup system I've come across in 25years of IT

[soniclab-cnc]

lol... perfect timing on this video. I am just about to set up a second nas in my shed for "offsite" backup. I looked through all the settings last night and had a rough idea how to create my replication tasks. I was pretty close but this will definitely help! Thanks Jeff! I am loving proxmox so much too! I will never go back to VMware... Proxmox just works.

[conquerordie]

Hi Jeff, at 11:01 when you were replicating the second backup job you narrated that you don't need encryption but you left it on the default "encryption" option instead of clicking "no encryption". I don't know if you caught this later on, but just a heads up. Thanks for your videos as always.

[PoeLemic]

Very helpful. I was reminded shortly again (during end of February) about importance of backups, because my File Server failed. I thought that I'd lost most of my stuff, or, at least, everything since August of 2020 -- when I backed-up shortly before the last Hurricane in Houston, Texas. But, I do believe in backups, but I was just backing-up within the same server. YEAH, DUMB MISTAKE. However, I never thought that Windows would start damaging data, and I copied my Master Copy onto the Backup Copy. But, eventually, I got it figured out, but it scared me quite a lot. Never been in that situation, so I guess (sadly) that I will have to advance my skillset to setup something like you have. Not exactly, but more like another computer on network just for backups. Thanks for your videos. Helps show us the best (or better) practices than what a lot of us have, right now.

[TrueNAS]

Cheers to another informative #TrueNAS video, Craft!