NAS failsafe and disaster recovery options

[TerryJC]

Right. Thanks. I eagerly await Monday Morning

[hamishmb]

Me too, hopefully it's worked

We have a manual backup on the USB stick now anyway, so that's good. It's only about 13MB, so the 4GB stick should be fine for a while.

[hamishmb]

Okay, automatic backup did not work, and I'm having trouble getting cron to do what I want it to do, as usual. When run manually the script runs fine but trying to run via cron seems to do nothing at all (but I have tested cron is working by running a command with it).

Do we definitely need automatic backups, or are manual ones good enough?

[TerryJC]

Do we definitely need automatic backups, or are manual ones good enough?

No. We don't definitely need automatic backups, but it prevents someone forgetting to do it.

According to the Manual for the DNS320L, there are Backup Apps (Remote Backups & Local Backups). Is there any reason why we can't use one of those?

[hamishmb]

That's an idea. I wonder if one of those can do database backups. That would be a simpler solution, and probably easier to maintain going forwards.

I don't know why, but cron never seems to work properly for me. It's pretty much always unreliable and hard to debug even when it is working, and I don't know why because it's a well-used long-term project.

[TerryJC]

That's an idea. I wonder if one of those can do database backups. That would be a simpler solution, and probably easier to maintain going forwards.

I think it might be less sophisticated than that. This is a consumer device, so they're more concerned about backing up your music and videos.

I don't know why, but cron never seems to work properly for me. It's pretty much always unreliable and hard to debug even when it is working, and I don't know why because it's a well-used long-term project.

I'me afraid that I've never used cron.

[hamishmb]

Okay, fixed now I think. I'm not exactly sure what was wrong, but I think it was several things including me setting the time for the job incorrectly. It successfully ran a job while I was logged out just now though, so let's wait until Monday morning again to see if it works. This time I'm a lot more confident.

[hamishmb]

Note for the future: It is not possible to do a database backup on the NAS box using phpMyAdmin, because the box is too slow to finish this before the PHP execution limit is exceeded (300 seconds).

It may be possible to change this limit, but for now the problem is resolved by copying the pre-existing backups form the USB stick (which can also be done with scp), and using the backup and restore scripts as needed (available at https://gitlab.com/wmtprojectsteam/nas- ... ree/master, and already installed on NAS box)

[hamishmb]

Forgot to check until now, but the weekly NAS box backups are confirmed working now.

[TerryJC]

Good news.