Backup desktop files to hard drive on router, best method?

[northbear]

Looking to backup the computers on my network to a USB hard drive connected to my ASUS RT-AC56U router. The computers are running linux (Ubuntu MATE 16.04) and I will be using deja dup and/or Back in Time for the software on the computers.

My question is simply this: What protocol would be the best to use, ftp, ssh, smb (Samba), NFS, or something else? My priority would be ease of use and reliability, but speed is also a consideration. I was thinking NFS, but on the WIKI it says it is still "a bit unstable". Is this still true? Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated!

 

[microchip]

I recommend rsync, if you can get it to run on the router. I use it on my NAS where one drive is only for backups. rsync is nice as it's easy to set up and also efficient (only backs up files that were changed). you can automate it too by writing some simple script and run that script under cron on every computer you want to backup. Simple and efficient

 

[RMerlin]

NFS stability issues are mostly with the MIPS routers (RT-N66U and RT-AC66U). NFS is still only barely tested.

SMB is simplest, rsync would be fastest.

 

[northbear]

microchip and RMerlin,

Thanks for replys! Since there are other options I will avoid NFS. A "simple script" is still beyond my capabilities , but Back in Time is a GUI front end for rsync which uses hard links to save space for the backup snapshots.

Looking into it further, I found that by default, rsync uses SSH for its communication so I think I will start with that. Deja Dup is a Duplicity front end and is also compatible with SSH. I am assuming I can get to the USB drive on the router via SSH, but will take a look.

Only reason I am thinking of using Deja Dup and Back in Time is that Deja Dup is the default backup tool for Ubuntu and has very good integration with the file manager. But I dislike how Deja Dup uses an opaque format (backup to a single file) vs native / browsable backup that that rsync gives. I had used (and liked) Lucky Backup (another rsync GUI front end) directly connected to each computer, but as of 2014 development is frozen so I thought I should find another tool.

Backing up to a hard drive connected to the router and automating the backup will definitely give me more frequent updates than my previous method, which was done whenever happened to think "boy, it has been a while since I backed up"

Thanks again!

 

[northbear]

Just to give some closure on this thread. I am now using Deja Dup and Grsync.

Here is how I got it working: http://www.snbforums.com/threads/ca...not-gui-why-and-how-to-fix.34261/#post-277854