Rsync with NAS & Storagecraft ShadowProtect Desktop

[Al Grant]

Hi Guys,

I hope I can get some advice here which will let me better understand rsync
a bit better.

The situation is this:

We have about 5 computers in a workgroup setup running XP mainly. Via
Storagecraft ShadowProtect Desktop they run Weekly full backups with hourly
incrementals M-Sun. There is a two week retention police in place for the
backups and the business is open 7 days. The backups are stored on a QNAP
NAS (239ProII from memory - a good wee unit)

In order to staisfy the requirement to have offsite backup we have two disks
that we attach to the NAS and rotate weekly. These disks are kept "insync"
with the NAS content via a flavour of rsync in the NAS GUI.

For M-F business this it is no problem if the Fullbackup is done on a Friday
night (takes about 40 min) and then the NAS starts a rsync to the USB
attached offsite disks. Now this can often run for about 36-40 hours, which
is no problem on a weekend. M-F the rsyncs schedule is just doing
incrementals - easy.

A business that is open 7 days is a problem, because the CPU load on the NAS
is very high during the rsync operation and as it runs for about 36 hours it
is impossible to avoid it running during business hours.

I see two possible workarounds, and are open to ideas:

1. As the NAS runs a cutdown version of linux called busybox I could
start/stop the rsync to do the full backup over several nights using crontab
etc. A bit beyond my knowledge at the moment but I could read up on it.

2. I was wondering if there was a way to do some fancy rsync command line
options based on the fact that each week when Shadow Protect Desktop (SPD)
creates a full backup it is given a incremental name something like
PC_A_068.spf, the next weeks full backup will then be called PC_A_069.spf
etc etc.

Now although the names of the files are different the content is largely the
same. Can you somehow use this to rsyncs advantage?

Cheers in advance

-Al




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