Hi,
TLDR, I am looking at the best / recommanded way to back up my truenas data to a synology nas.
I used to use synology as my nas, after trying truenas for a while in parallel I have decided to move to truenas as my main, and to set up the synology as a remote backup.
Now I can find good documentation to do that. Looks like most use cases are the other way around.
so, looking for recommendations on how to set this up.
Thanks,
I like using Active Backup for Business package and setup file server backup.
Read only account on TrueNAS and Synology pulls from it. If one gets compromised, the other is more resilient.
Since I trust TrueNAS more than Synology, I would do it the other way round.
I run rsync backups from one TrueNAS to another TrueNAS, works great
Rsync offers the most reliable and efficient method for backing up TrueNAS data to a Synology NAS. This approach only transfers changed data after the initial sync, saving bandwidth and storage space.
Start by enabling SSH on your Synology and creating a dedicated backup user and destination folder. Then set up an Rsync Task in TrueNAS pointing to your Synology, configuring your desired schedule and retention policies.
All valid points, but I still prefer “pulling” data to backup, not “pushing”. This way device you are backing up doesn’t have credentials for the device you backup to.
thanks for the feebacks, rsync up and running.
now, what would you recommand has a vpn solution ?
I like pushing. This way Synology with its trash software does not have credentials for my TrueNAS 
But seriously I get your point. I want your Synology to be “immutable”. If I would go down that road, I would use a read only users, so Synology can not break anything on TrueNAS.
Or if you use something like Backblaze, you can make it immutable there for as an example 30 days.
great rsync + ssh in place. now I need to figure out the vpn connection. I would like synology to be a wireguard client. and oh luck, synology doesn’t support wireguard!
rsync over ssh is already encrypted, no VPN needed.
for my use case I would need it. the 2 device are behind 2 different residential in internet with rolling ips.
one endpoint allready have a wireguard server, so I’d much prefer have the synology on a vpn (client).
I finally settled on tailsale, much easier to setup and allow me to move the synolgy around.
i am facing a permission issue with rsync. many dataset hosting DB are set to 700, hence blocking the access to the user set for sync.
That is what DynDNS is for. And also applies to WG.
So one endpoint already has DynDNS? Use that endpoint as destination.
Yeah, that solves the DynDNS issue.
Would it not be better to backup these DB and than sync these backup files instead?
probably!
I fixed the issues, and got the replication working accros the board. but I am indeed wondering is a simple file copy is really the way to go. not sure the simply copying the files back would be enough to recover.
on proxmox, I snapshot the vm, and save the image remotely. I was wondering i there are was something similar on truenas.
Well it depends on what DB you use, but most of them have simply create a file which you then can use for recovery.
TrueNAS can of course also make a ZFS Snapshot, just like Proxmox.
You could then send that Snapshot to another ZFS host.
I personally am not a big fan of that. I like to have my backup system different than ZFS again.
Just to be save and have two kinds of “media” and follow the 321 rule.
thx, that’s pretty much what I am doing .
my quesiton now is how to exctrat the data. today, I am juste copying all files, which includes the DB from apps like nextcloud or gitea. I am concern that a simple file copy would result in corrupted backups.
cheers.
I’m also trying to move my old synology offsite for backup.
I ended up setting up my NAS on proxmox (samba in Debian LXC). And my plan is to use Borg for backup. I figure it might be more efficient on bandwidth since you can run a local borg process on both sides. I was planning on creating a container on the synology to run borg backup.
Rsync might work well too, but I think you’d need to run the rsync deamon in order to save bandwidth (if that’s not true, please let me know!)