G’day guys,
I made another video explaining how I setup automatic Tiered Snapshots and how to use them for data recovery on Windows, macOS, the shell and in your VMs
Enjoy
Don’t forget to update your YouTube page. (It’s this thread 
)
The TrueNAS Forum Thread for this video:
TBA
You just did it in time it took me to tease you, Gosh Darn It.
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Ye Olde Chicken and Egg 
I rate it a 9/10 on the video.
I cannot give it a perfect 10, since he referred to “zee vols” as “zed vols”. Simple mistake, but accuracy is key.
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But Zed Eff Ess is okay
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@Stux Thanks for a great tutorial!
I’m struggling to work out how I can leverage this to do off-site backups with history. I’ve Googled backing up TrueNAS to a share and everyone says “just use rsync.” In my understanding rsync only gets you one copy of the data not backup history.
To use the snapshots feature and be able to restore a complete local system failure, I would need a starting point from where all of the snapshots are based. I could just do an rsync of the full data that I want to backup then rsync the .zfs folders. However, this falls into the ever growing snapshot pitfall.
I then thought about having a job that re-rsynced the full data set every so often and killed old snapshots. However there is a possibility of data changing during the full rsync and then losing that change.
Are there any other proven ways to do this?
I was hopeful that TrueCloud would be capable to backing up to a remote share, but that is not an option as far as I could tell. (I don’t want to pay for cloud storage OR have my data hosted somewhere.)
The TrueNAS documentation talks about using replication for backups but I have not been able to find a lot of information on this.
Any help is appreciated!
The trick is to replicate to another TrueNAS.
Perhaps offsite.
In a personal scenario perhaps at a friend or relatives.
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Does it have to be a TrueNAS system?
I currently have a Synology that I want to move to be my offsite backup and use TrueNAS as my primary. (I am currently lacking offsite backup but I don’t waht to have to purchase 2 systems.)
To support and leverage ZFS atomic snapshots (and incremental replication streams), both sides need to be ZFS.
Thanks for the video, @Stux.
I’m about to set the snapshots schedule you proposed; however, I have one concern. This schedule definitely fits general-purpose file share. But what about a workstation’s backup share?
Let’s assume that a backup of a workstation takes about an hour. During that hour several 10-minutes snapshots would be made (because of dataset changes). But recovering from these snapshots doesn’t make much sense. Because they will contain incomplete network-disconnect-like backups.
I’m not sure about windows, but macOS incomplete backups can screw up the entire backup history (I’m looking at you, <my-hostname>.purgeable). So, shouldn’t snapshots of backup shares have been taken less often? Like just hourly or even daily?
TrueNAS creates separate snapshots for MacOS timemachine backups when they complete.
These are maintained automatically, and allow you to restore the time machine backup itself if it becomes corrupted.
I normally don’t backup my backups…
Meanwhile, Timemachine offers its own “snapshot” feature, which is why I exclude Time Machine from my snapshot schedule.
Wow, sounds like a nice feature. However:
- I now see only your tiered snapshots of my TimeMachine share. And there were definitely successful backups before I set up the schedule. Perhaps it should be manually set up in the current versions (I’m using the “Basic time machine share” preset).
- I found users were complaining of this feature not preserving the retention policy. Also, they complained about not being able to see this feature in the GUI and the lack of documentation for the feature and share aux params. That was back in 2021. I didn’t find a GUI option or documentation now.
- I found a bug report that prevents this feature from taking snapshots from new version of macOS backups. That was back in 2023. While the bug was fixed long ago, I consider that these auto-snapshots can be unreliable.
Summing up, I’ll stick to your tiered snapshots for ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶ now.
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