DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

Ok thanks i'll take a look at that.

Thanks for the comments!  All feedback is welcome.

halfsoul wrote:

1) The fonz-on-USB is great, but it got a little confusing because of the version differences
- in the previous step, the instruction was to download latest stable version of ffp
- then, during USB setup, only 0.3 is available
- Do you plan to add ffp 0.4 on usb? :-)

I added a note about directory names and ffp versions to the website--hopefully that will clear up potential future confusion.  I definitely will be updating my USB key instructions for newer ffp as soon as I upgrade myself.  I will probably skip ffp 0.4 though, since I don't see enough benefit from that version over 0.3.

halfsoul wrote:

2) The instructions make reference to v1.0.1, but the only package I saw on the sourceforge download page was 1.0

This should have been clearer.  Basically, the 1.0.0 release came out before I had worked on the USB stuff, so those files will be available in the future releases of BackupNetClone.  For now though, the files have direct links.  I added a comment that should help make it clearer until I release 1.0.2 (which will have auto-deletion of old snapshots when the drive is full).

halfsoul wrote:

3) I really wanted to try to get it running, but the instructions were far too daunting for my limited experience.
- With enough time, I could certainly figure it out, but I just don't have the time
- I know you're working on getting instructions set up, any idea for an ETA?

Yep, that is the biggest downfall of BackupNetClone--the time required for installation.  I'm still hoping someone will come along who has plenty of spare time to automate it all.

Speaking of spare time, I have very little lately so I won't promise any ETA on when the instructions will be complete.  I've been spending spare moments recently on adding the new delete feature (now done and checked in--need to build a release and document it).  My spare time comes randomly and for unknown lengths of time...  Otherwise I'd love to promise a date for when things will be done.

halfsoul wrote:

PS. How is the disk usage managed?  I have 229 GB used, 44.5 GB free... is the free space too small to make incremental backup solution worthwile (as opposed to nightly Volume sync)?

Data is stored using the Linux (ext2 and other file systems for Linux) built-in hard link concept.  So for every snapshot the only new space required for it is whatever files have changed since the last snapshot.  So if you slightly modify a 400MB file every day, and you do a BNC snapshot every night, then regardless of the size of the rest of the data, each snapshot will increase your disk usage by 400MB.

With your 45GB free, it would probably be worthwhile to use BNC on a second drive of identical size.  What I would call normal usage is making a few documents each day, which probably means generating MAXIMUM 1GB per day, so BNC would provide 45 days of snapshots assuming your overall data didn't grow.  Obviously, if you're ripping DVDs or doing video editing, your daily growth is going to be a lot more, in which case you'll want bigger hard drives anyway...

I've had BNC up and running for a while now under ffp0.4.  Does anyone know if I'd be okay upgrading to ffp0.5 - or will that mess up BNC (in particular the SvcwRsync user and the SSH keys)?