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. Enter 
   

   blkid /dev/sdd2

   
   It will show you the UUID of the partition you want to mount
   

   root@nas04[/home/admin]# blkid /dev/sdd2
   /dev/sdd2: LABEL_FATBOOT="EFI" LABEL="EFI" UUID="B7D1-A689" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="5545caa6-b0c3-4558-b222-aac5fb9c0026"

5. Create a mountpoint
   sudo mkdir /mnt/LaCie
6. Mount the device
   sudo mount /dev/sdd2 /mnt/LaCie
7. add to fstab
   /dev/sdd2 /mnt/LaCie hfsplus rw,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:

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

All these files/directories will not be copied to the target drive. These items are created by MacOS and will automaticall re-created, when these objecst in the backup are used by MacOS.

The command for the rsync job looks like this:

rsync -av --delete --log-file="/var/log/rsyncd.LaCie.log" --no-perms --no-owner --exclude-from "/root/rsync_exclude.txt" /mnt/N4pool/ /mnt/LaCie/backup 

If you want to run it over the network:

rsync -av --delete --log-file="/var/log/rsyncd.LaCie.log" --no-perms --no-owner --exclude-from "/root/rsync_exclude.txt" rsync@nas04.simmy.ch:/mnt/N4pool/ /mnt/LaCie/backup 

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

How to use UUID to mount a volume