Backup to USB Drive

Introduction

For same applications it might be necessary to use an external drive without adding this drive to a ZPool. E.g. if you want to copy from or to an external device.

Setup / mounting

TrueNAS will not mount a drive automatically when plugged into an USB Port. This has to be done manually. In this example I will use an external drive from LaCie.

1. Plug in the drive to any USB Port
2. Figure out the name of the device. It can be seen in Storage --> Disks. It is usually the drive without pool.
3. Enter lsblk -p | grep "disk\|part". It will show show the exact name of the partition you want to mount. 
   In this case it is sdd2.
   
4. Create a mountpoint
   sudo mkdir /mnt/LaCie
5. Mount the device
   sudo mount /dev/sdd2 /mnt/LaCie
6. add to fstab
   /dev/sdd2 /mnt/LaCie hfsplus ro,relatime,umask=22,uid=0,gid=0,nls=utf8 0 0

Create an rsync job

Create the file /root/rsync_exclude.txt with this content:

.recycle
ix-applications
.ssh
ftp-path
home
replika
.~tmp~
*/._*
*/.DocumentRevisions-V100/
*/.DS_Store
*/.fseventsd/
*/.Spotlight-V100/
*/.TemporaryItems/
*/.Trashes/
.@*
.~tmp~*
@Recycle
*.DS_Store@__thumb
sync.ffs_lock

The command for the rsync job looks like this:

rsync -anv --delete --log-file="/var/log/rsyncd.LaCie.loglog" --exclude-from "/root/rsync_exclude.txt" /mnt/N4poolN4pool/ /mnt/usb_driveLaCie --no-perms

-v

Add to cron

Goto System settings --> Advanced -->Cron Jobs Add

Useful links

rsync documentation

Manually mount a USB drive in the Linux terminal

How To Use Rsync to Sync Local and Remote Directories