I have just ordered NAS backup for my server, however I am a little unsure as to the best way to use it!

I would like to setup cpbackup to use the NAS volume.

I can mount the volume ok, and I added it to fstab and ran a test backup from the command line, this worked however all the privs were wrong on the copied files.

I have an open ticket in Orbit and was recomended to use automount.

Has anyone got a similar thing setup that could give me some pointers?

I found the NAS too unreliable for automated backups, so I backup to a second HDD then manually copy it over to the NAS.

Same and the speeds are not always very consistent.

Actually, I have found the NAS system to be very reliable myself. The only problem I had was in trying to backup directly to the mount. When I did this I noticed very slow performance. (An exaggerated amount of nearly twelve hours!) However, when I switched to FTP backup to NAS, it cut the backup back down to around a half hour.

The problem is that you can't restore backups over FTP, so I backup via FTP and restore from the mount! It works out really well, though. I definitely am happy with the service.

How to tell WHM to connect to NAS backup point via FTP, considering this type of connecting

smbmount //smbackup01.dllstx5.servermatrix.com/c1234-1 /mnt/backup -o username=c1234-1,lfs

What should be put, say, for Ftp Backup Host, and what for Ftp Backup User?

TIA

I would suggest looking into automount for your nas account:

http://support.theplanet.com/knowledgebase...gory_id=0&sid2=

I suggest you all use cifs rather than smbfs, the latter being unstable and now unsupported. The reason for the permission issues is that its a remote box, you'll need to tarball anything before you move it over if you want to maintain permissions.

We've had problems recently with the NAS becoming unwriteable, I've since had our shares moved. I recommend you monitor your backups to make sure they are being copied over.

Our fstab entry looks like the following



Replace the path and username where appropriate. Then create a file in your /root/.naspasswd/ directory that contains the mount details, it should look like the following.



Using cifs you can have files bigger than 2GB, a problem we had with smbfs.

Better yet set the backup to incremental (rsync) to a second hdd, and subsequently rsync that to a shell account in a whole other company datacenter.

You can get such offsite storage for 50 cents/GB, an rsync copy requires little bw, takes a fraction of the resources required to flog your server with tar and gzip every night, it's readily accessible for restore, and it's also fully accessible if TP ever gets mad at you and locks your entire account.

Getting locked out is probably far fetched for most of us... but you never know.

You have your first line of backup on the second hdd, it doesn't rely on network issues, and that's likely all you ever need. The offsite is just another layer, but a good one if you don't want to be agonizing and apologizing later when things go south.

I run a backup like that twice a day, cpanel incremental followed immediately by rsync offsite, currently covering about 15GB of data.

A regular cpanel backup of that much used to take a few hours of serious grinding, gzipping the same crap every night, whether it had changed or not. Now the incremental and followup offsite rsync together take less than an hour and have much lower impact on resource usage.

Thank you for the suggestions. Still the topic is how to use the WHM backup utility with NAS.

I did the following and it worked

Remount/Unmount backup drive - Enabled
Bail out if the backup drive - Enabled
Incremental backup - Disabled
Backup Accounts - Enabled
Backup Config Files - Disabled
Backup Type - Remote FTP
Ftp Backup Host - smbackup01.dllstx5.servermatrix.com
Ftp Backup User - c12345-1 (subst. your login)
Ftp Backup Pass - Your Pass
Ftp Backup Directory - empty
Backup Destination - your mount point

The WHM Backup will create all necessary dirs and overwrite tarballs.

When restoring cpbackups, you have first to SSH connect to your NAS drive and only then start the restore backup procedure.

Yet, I would recommend moving the tarballs to /home and then using the cpmove restore, otherwise tarballs will be untarred in the NAS dir and only then restored to the /home dir.

Have you tried my FTP backup script? It lets cPanel do backups to your secondary drive then FTPs the backups to your external backup device:

http://www.webhostgear.com/174.html