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.

Plug in the drive to any USB Port
Figure out the name of the device. It can be seen in Storage --> Disks. It is usually the drive without pool.
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.

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"

Create a mountpoint
```
mkdir /mnt/LaCie
```

add to fstab

UUID=B7D1-A689 /mnt/LaCie vfat rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro 0 0

Mount the device
```
mount -a
```

Explanation

It seems to be awkward to make so many steps to mount an USB device. However, TrueNAS does no auto mount. So a permanent mount must be added manually to the fstab. And furthermore, TrueNAS seems to change the name of the partition frequently, so the UUID of the partition has to be used.

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 objects 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