Problem/Justification
(What is the problem you are trying to solve with this feature/improvement or why should it be considered?)
If for some reason your system fails or gets nuked (accident, hardware failure, bad upgrade, something malicious, etc) and you do not have a recent settings backup because they have to be made manually, you will have to configure again from scratch or figure out the delta between now and the last backup you have.
Impact
(How is this feature going to impact all TrueNAS users? What are the benefits and advantages? Are there disadvantages?)
Users will have one less thing to worry about if something they changed causes issues and they want to roll back real quick, or if they have a previously stated catastrophe.
User Story
(Please give a short description on how you envision some user taking advantage of this feature, what are the steps a user will follow to accomplish it)
A simple gui that allows you to choose the backup interval, location to drop it (dataset/folder, share, cloud, email, etc), and whether to include the secret seed or not. Bonus points if it has rotation so you dont end up with 3000 configs. Also a setting to not save a config if nothing changed might be nice, but personally I would value automatic rotation much more.
i do not see this anywhere in the documentation. regardless, a more useful system to save to a pool or cloud or whatever of your choice that would not be affected by loss of the boot pool/system dataset and is easier to access for restoration would still preferable.
For whatever reason, iX has never thought it was worth documenting this.
These are not the same thing; the .system dataset is ordinarily stored on the first data pool you create (though you can tell the GUI to put it on a different pool if you choose).
Unfortunately, it looks like the cloud sync tasks only want to work with something that’s under a pool. A workaround would be a daily cron task (maybe at 4:00 am, since the backups are taken at 3:45) of rsync -av /var/db/system/configs-whatever /mnt/tank/configs-backup/. That puts a copy of the backups within a pool mount point; from there, you can use any of the cloud replication tasks you want to send them wherever you want.
Look at my signature, there are links to Multi-Report and TrueNAS Backup. TrueNAS Backup only send you a copy of your config file each time you run it. Set a CRONJOB up to run it weekly, or however often you desire, and you will have it in your email shortly afterwards.
This feature is part of Multi-Report which is also a nice tool, it does a lot more than sending you your config file.
