Backup SYSFS and VOLUME0

[Kamishki]

Quick question on backing up my disks....
I have a 302 and am looking to finish by backup plans. I am not doing RAID but I have a just want a solid backup strategy to backup to external drives. I back up the config..but this seems to pick up the user data and privliges.

I am missing much of the Linux environment on the NAS like the the applicaitons and their configurations and things like the VPN setups can anyone help me to identify if there is a single mount or volume that has the rest of the info.

I am just starting to understand the embedded linux boot stuff and I am still working what all the mounts are for....any strategy I come up with should include some thought on how I would restore the data and apps.

Any help would be apprecieated.

[orion]

I'm not sure what you mean "the rest of the info". Anyway, if you can login to NAS by ssh with root account, you should be able to see file system mounting information by commands "df" and "cat /proc/mdstat". Volume0 is a md raid-1 device. You can backup whole volume0, but I doubt how you should restore it in case.
If you are looking for lower level raw data on flash device, I believe it varies by models. My as-304t applies mtd to map to flash device. However, I would not touch it (it's too dangerous ).

[Kamishki]

Thanks for you post...
I guess my goal is simple...If I want to swap out the drives...I wonder how I can restore the apps and the app configurations. Asus doesn't provide a tool for that so I want to identify the parts of the files system that I need to backup and restore.

[orion]

Oh, I see. It's somehow complex enough (as I know), especially restore old data and configuration to a totally new system. And there should be differences among different models. But it's a good feature that I want. You should post it onto feature request bulletin.

[gibxxi]

For apps that use database files in addition to config files, I copy off the NAS the config files for those apps and their relevant databases, so that in addition to the ADM config backup, I have copies of all the config files for the apps/plugins I run. I use SmartFTP, which supports SFTP over SSH and also has a built-in Terminal client.

A lot of addons will store their relevant configuration files on the NAS in the app's own folder under a folder called "config" for each addon. The exact path is: "/volume1/.@plugins/AppCentral/APP-NAME/config".

There are exceptions to this rule though. For example, Mono, Deluge and NzbDrone / Sonarr store their user preferences/config files in the admin user's home folder instead. When copying or restoring the configuration files it will be best-served to login via SSH (SFTP over SSH) as the "admin" user, as most apps run via this user account. And when restoring your configuration files for the addons, you don't want them being assigned root user ownership, as the admin user those apps run under will not then have permission to read / write / execute those files and a lot of manual "Chown-ing" of the files / folders may be required to get the addons to work correctly.

YMMV.