Synology - best practices / recommendations for a clean backup

[david3]

I’ve used Duplicacy Web as the primary backup tool for the single volume on my DS920+ for over a year. I’ve defaulted to the “kitchen sink” approach and set up the entire volume as the repository. This appears to collect all of the user files from the shared folders plus other system-related bits and pieces that may or may not be of any use as part of a restore. The backup log is also filled with a lot of noise: “permission denied” and “cannot be opened” entries for system-related files. Here’s the final line from the log today:

WARN BACKUP_SKIPPED 678 directories and 248 files were not included due to access errors

What’s the best way to make the job more “surgical”, ensure that I’m backing up everything that is important (ex: Duplicacy configuration and settings), and keep the logs less noisy?

Sidenote: I currently don’t see a way around using DSM Hyper Backup to grab system configuration details and at least some of the package apps that are installed (of course, HB only backs up “approved” Sysnology packages ). Any alternative suggestions are welcomed.

[saspus]

You can add exclusions, or you can start backing up another folder that contains symlinks to folders that you want to backup.

Duplicacy follows first level symlinks.

that is important (ex: Duplicacy configuration and settings),

This one is actually not important. You need storage credentials and encryption password, which should live in your password manager. If duplicacy config needs restoring that would mean your Synology catastrophically fail, and in this case it’s much faster to install from scratch

@david3

currently don’t see a way around using DSM Hyper Backup

After every change to the system configuration you can export system config manually and put the file in the folder that is getting backed up. This is expected to be an extremely rare event — how often are you changing settings after initial configuration? Along the same vein, I’d argue backing up Synology system config is quite pointless in the first place. If the box catastrophically fail, in would setup the new one from scratch, out of sheer distrust for Synology software quality.

[david3]

Thanks! Good recommendations and points.

I had not considered creating symlinks to specify what needs to be backed up. That seems to be an easy way to grab just what I need.

For Docker, I’m exporting the container images to files which Duplicacy will pick up.

Any thoughts on how to deal with installed packages? I probably have ~30 packages installed - some of which are dependencies for the ones I actually use. Besides manually documenting everything to install after a catastrophic failure, would there be another way to address that?

[saspus]

@david3

I’m exporting the container images to files which Duplicacy will pick up.

Containers are ephemeral and disposable by design. There is no point in backing them up. Depending on how you mount the volumes into the container, backing up those from the host would be the way to go.

@david3

Besides manually documenting everything to install after a catastrophic failure, would there be another way to address that?

My general contempt towards synology is probably shining though my every post, but I’ll try to contain myself…

I would backup only select application data, and if everything fails – install from scratch. I have 0 trust in sinology’s ability to restore everything coherently without introduction of a variety of other issues. I would not document anything though – once you get new machine just install stuff on the as needed basis.

(Ideally, you would switch to another NAS solution and would not need to restore anything in the first place though – sorry, could not resist )