Newbie question, I think. I have two Truenas machines, one lent to me by a pro, and another I have built from scrratch. Objective is to use my machine to perform a backup of a network share over smb (nfs would be fine too, I can’t get that working either but that’s a topic for another post). So first I want to mount the share, then I’ll do an rsync. After some futzing about I now get that editing the fstab is not the way to go. So on the pro’s machine, I was able to write an Init script that works fine, pretty simple, mount -t cifs -o etc.
But this same script does not work on the machine I have set up from scratch. Specifically, it doesn’t work when run as an Init script, and I have been trying to run the command via the shell with many variations to no success - the command just hangs. I’ve tried running it in verbose mode but I see nothing jumping out at me.
Just seems weird that it would work on one machine and not another (they are one minor version of the OS apart). Any help for a newbie please? TIA.
TrueNAS was not designed to mount either NFS or SMB shares, only supply them. Some people have worked around various problems and have gotten it to work. But, their is no certainty that it will continue to work. TrueNAS is designed as an appliance, which means anything that is not a supported feature can disappear in later releases.
To solve the problem, ZFS was specifically designed to support both full and incremental dataset or full pool Sends and Receives via network. (Or even local disk…) This can be implemented via SSH or raw Netcat, (faster, but limited security & harder to setup). These ZFS Sends & Receives are known as ZFS Replication.
One issue with NFS copies and possibly NAS to NAS copies using SMB, is file & directory attributes, (owner, group, permissions, etc…).
So, you need to decide if ZFS Replication can work for you. It only works at the dataset or zVol level, (which includes the top level dataset in a pool). If you desire is to copy only specific files or directory trees, then Replication may not work for you.
Another option, (which may or may not copy all your file and directory attributes), is RSync. This can be done either over SSH or via RSync daemons, which is harder to setup.
Thanks for the background. I definitely want to get to a state where I am doing a Truenas to Truenas backup, as it obviously has many advantages. But the first stage of this is getting my Truenas backup server working with a Pure Storage array, which in the past has backed up to a Synology that simply mounted it via SMB. Just until I can get this Pure array replaced mind you…
