To Rsync or not to Rsync?
 

Hi, and please be patient.

I am a total greenhorn (I would need a few lessons with Linux to be considered even a newbie).

I have been (by being the man with one eye in the kingdom of the blind) given the task of handling our company's back-ups. We currently have 25 employees, and we all run Windows. I run a daily and a monthly backup for each user. We are still running without a server, so just a simple peer-to-peer network; and yes I back-up to two different locales to avoid the 20 connection limit.

I haven't had any problems until now. "We" want to have our back-ups replicated off site, as we have grown into a mid-sized corporation, and are continuing to grow at a good clip. I have a Synology NAS and a QNAP NAS that I am using for storing our back-ups.

I am currently using Cobian for a daily backup of two directories on each user, and that size varies from 2-25 GB per day, based upon the user. I use Acronis to run a monthly image of each computer which varies from 45-250 GB in size, again based upon the user.

From what I have read so far, Rsync seems to be the best way to copy information from my Synology NAS at the office, to the QNAP NAS which will be off-site.

Now for some questions...

Will Rsync be able to perform a block level, "incremental" back-up so as not to use all of my bandwidth each day?

Should I be using Rsync on each workstation to backup daily as well? (Instead of Cobian) I am concerned that the single zip file from Cobian may leave some critical files corrupted on an "incremental" backup.

I have been toying with the Rsync but can not get it to connect over my LAN from my computer to the Synology (I do have SSH enabled on the Synology - but I again have no clue how to make that work either).

The batch file I had written to attempt to backup the users folder on WTL's computer is as follows...
SET CWRSYNCHOME=C:\Program Files (x86)\cwRsync\bin\CWRSYNC
SET HOME=C:\WTL\
SET CWOLDPATH=C:\WTL\
SET PATH=C:\Program Files (x86)\cwRsync\bin;C:\WTL\
rsync -az -progress -e ssh /cygdrive/c/users/WTL/ root@192.168.0.35:/Rsync/04Wednesday/WTL/

Now I am confident that I didn't follow the instructions properly, as it doesn't work. I get the following, root@192.168.0.35's password:
access denied, please try again. I do not have the NAS password protected. Is that my problem? Does SSH require that I have a password on my admin (or root in this case) account in order to work?

My apologies, and my thanks for any insight, and assistance.

You can tell rsync what directories and/or subdirectories to back up. You can to tell rsync to only copy the files and/or directories to the backup which are newer than the backup copy, thus saving bandwidth as compared to a total copy of every file.

Compressing files and/or packing multiple files into one backup file saves storage space. On the negative side they also complicate and slow down the restore process. If you have adequate backup space available then I recommend that you do not use compression and do not pack several files into a single backup file.

I do not have enough experience with SSH to answer your SSH questions. Perhaps somebody else can answer those.

--------------------
Steve Stites

You should setup passwordless SSH. Here are a couple of HOWTOs --> one, two Also, why backup as root? You should just backup as a regular user.