How to actually start backups

[Timon]

For some reason I can't open the help file so I have a few questions.

How do you setup the reference device?

Hod do you actually start the backup?

[randy]

You start a backup with an Event using a BLBackup action. The device just reports the current status or last backup. Create a status only virtual device then put its RefID in the BLBackup configuration.

[Timon]

Thank you.

On the RefID node can you have it display the percent done using different icons? That would be nice having a clock type icon that changes every 10 percent and the text the way it currently works. Just a thought.

[Timon]

Now that it's running I want to send the backups to a SMB server. On my Ubuntu system I can see and access the SMB server via the GUI but I can't seem to access it from the command line or BLBackup. Has anyone done this?

[Timon]

Forget my last post. I didn't realize that some modules were not installed.

First I needed to install the missing modules.

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

Once that was done I could mount the remote directory to an existing folder. In my case that folder was /home/homeseer/backups.

sudo mount -t cifs //smbserver/backups  /home/homeseer/backups -o username=user,password=user_password

Use the following to unmount.

sudo umount /home/homeseer/backups

This needs to be done when the system starts.

What nice about this is that if you don't mount, backups go to the local folder but once you mount files go to the remote server. Local software doesn't even know it's happening.

BTW, the folder /home/homeseer/backups should be an empty folder as anything in that folder will be hidden after the mount.

Now to figure out exactly how I want to do the final setup. Once done I'll post.

[Kerat]

I am a believer in the 3,2,1 concept of backups.
3 separate backups.
2 separate media types (HDD and cloud would count IMHO).
1 or more off-site backups

I would recommend using blbackup , then setup another process to synchronize your local backup to your share folder (bash script, rsync, duplicati to your share. then setup a separate process to synchronize that with a cloud storage host (S3 upload, duplicate to to encrypt and upload to an SFTP , winscp script with a put to an SFTP service etc).

Here, after a good deal of work I have almost all my systems migrated to VMs on my vsphere esxi host.

For OS level backups I am doing Snapshots and moving those to my primary NAS (Freenas). My next endeavor will be to install Veam ESXi backup on one of my member servers and set my backups to push to my primary NAS.
I have snapshots enabled on my primary NAS, I also do weekly Rsyncs to my secondary NAS.
For HS3 I am doing software level backups using BLBackup. I have an automatic NFS share that I have hosted on my primary NAS. There I can keep some 6 months of data.
Currently I am doing manual zwave interface backups whenever I add a device. If anyone has a method to automate this process I am all ears.
I am also doing a JSON export of my events manually after I make permanent changes.
I am still working on improving my off-site backup. Currently I use duplicati to securely SFTP to a cloud storage I pay for. I don’t have much space there but for application data level, and personal data backups it works.

I think you can setup your shares to auto mount. the following is how i do it in NFS:


install necessary pre-reqs:
sudo apt install nfs -common

create your mount directories:
sudo mkdir / nfs
sudo mkdir / nfs /backup

set adjust startup:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
hostname:/mnt/primary/backup /nfs/backup nfs auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800 0 0

complete mount.
sudo mount -a

confirm the mount is still there after reboot.
sudo reboot

[MattL0]

Is the help file an asp or aspx page?

[Timon]

It’s asp.

[MattL0]

Then , I hope blade will transfert this to another format on day

[MattL0]

Did turn on my windows machine and downloaded the plugin on windows.

It will b usefull for me too!!

[MattL0]

This is unreadable sorry. I’ll look into it tomorow

[MattL0]

Maybe better

[Timon]

MattL0,

Thanks for the Help info. It allowed me to finish up the reference devices to show status.

[Timon]

I'm not quite sure how to actually setup the backups. Normally I like to do a Daily(1-6), Weekly(1-5) and Monthly(1-12) backups which allows for complete recovery. So I would setup events to do them. However I don't see how to do this for the same directory when they are only listed by directory and they are all the same.

It would be nice if it was listed in the dropdown box as "Daily /opt/HomeSeer" or "Weekly /opt/HomeSeer" or even just allow one to use the Alias.

Am I missing something?