I am using a 1TB external hard drive to back up two Linux machines and one each of Windows 10 and 7. I prefer to do daily backups, but that is a lot of work getting the drive to each machine. Can anyone direct me to (or tell me how) a good video or tutorial on the subject, using Linux as the os? I have a WIFI router with a 3.0 USB port. (I only have a 2.0 on the hdd, but who knows what the future may hold!) I like to do snapshots of the OSes and separately do the user files so they can be easily accessed. I understand there is some software which will allow a machine to access the router and when done will log that machine off so as not to hog the ext hd from the other machines.


Thanks

"Using Linux as the OS", where exactly?

From what I'm reading, you have a WIFI router that has a USB jack on it and you wish to hook up a USB HDD to that to perform backups from several systems over WIFI.

Is that correct?

That is my understanding...

Post the make and model number of the router.
Post the distribution/version you are running.

It depends on what protocols it supports but I would guess at least windows networking i.e. SMB/CIFS. You should be to access the share from the file browser as well as mount it from the command line which will require you to install the samba client utilities. It also matters how you plan to create snapshots since for example hard links can not be created on a network drive.

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Thank you for the replies. The no snapshots on a network drive is a deal breaker, the essence of my idea was for the convenience of backups for all the machines, speeding up the process, etc.

Unless your wifi is unusually fast - ideally Gigabit(!) = 100MB/sec or 100Mbit = 10MB/sec, your backups will take forever.

Consider how long it will take to backup 1GB = 1,000MB, them multiply that by a thousand.

Thanks for the heads up Jeremy Boden, just a bad idea all the way around. Just think of me being in a lazy mood. I thought I could save some work, didn't have the knowledge to recognize it for what it was (bad idea).

If you have a USB3 connection on your PC, then getting a portable multi-Terabyte external drive could be a possible solution.
You should probably achieve 50MB/sec on sequential read/writes.

If you write data using rsync - it will take a long time on the first run, but thereafter it will only write changed files (or portions of).
Which can help enormously if most files don't change much.

JeremyBoden If you have a USB3 connection on your PC, then getting a portable multi-Terabyte external drive could be a possible solution.
You should probably achieve 50MB/sec on sequential read/writes.

If you write data using rsync - it will take a long time on the first run, but thereafter it will only write changed files (or portions of).
Which can help enormously if most files don't change much.


I do have one laptop with 3.0 ports. This Dell (using) I am going to convert one of the card readers to USB 3.0. I use Timeshift to do the backups on the Linux Mint (18.3) machines and use rsync with it just capturing the OS, and doing user files with Backup Tool. I use Windows Backup for the Windows 7 and 10 (this I believe takes a snapshot but unknown if it is rsync).

I hooked an external drive into the router and got the Windows machines to recognize it by creating a share folder with the IP address in the network directory. I could not find a way to get Linux to recognize the external drive (through wifi).

The router is a Linksys EA7500, and has 3 USB ports on the back one of which is 3.0., runs at 2.5 or 5 ghz, and is hooked to a modem using cable internet.

If I install 3.0 USBs on the desktop I would be all set for the 3.0 hard drive.

Thanks for your time.

Depends on distribution/desktop you are running. Many file browsers have a built in samba client and can browse the network by selecting "Network". Or manually by entering smb://netbios_name or smb://IP_address in its URL box.

Otherwise you can manually mount the share but typically need to install the cifs-utils and samba-common packages.

"Otherwise you can manually mount the share but typically need to install the cifs-utils and samba-common packages."

michaelk, the dist. is Linux Mint 18.3, cinnamon desktop with Chrome browser. I already had cifs-utils installed and downloaded samba-common (with the GUI). I played around with the GUI a bit and thought I had installed a share folder with it in the Network directory. However, when looking for the file it is not there. The whole thing is above my knowledge base and I think I will leave it alone for a while.