I have found that the --fast-list option is a requirement for my B2 backups. Otherwise you end up with tons of Class B (I think) calls, which eventually add up to real money. Using that option significantly reduces those calls and I always then end up under the free limit of those transactions each day. (At least on the 11.x versions of FreeNAS. Maybe it's changed in v12?)
Thank you Tom. I finally bit the bullet and set the encrypted backup up for a piece of mind. With this I'll have the original, a local copy on external hard disk, as well as Backblaze. I feel pretty good about my odds in the event of disaster at this point.
You are wrong about sync and copy. If you chose copy, it will only push what's new, only the initial backup will take time. As for sync, by default it'll remove files remotely (which is not what you want for backup)
For those of you visiting this years on, the above comment is correct, however if you enable file immutability on Backblazes's side, when your truenas system deletes the file, it will be kept as a file revision until the policy on backblazes's side removes it (you can set this for however many days you wish. I have it set to 90 days). This is critical to ensure that you aren't wasting costs on files that you genuninely want gone. I personally intend on setting up a 2nd truenas system with cheap spinners to keep all files regardless of deletion status, so that I do not incur any cloud costs for keeping them.
This is a good tutorial but if you are using BackBlaze be aware of their API costs. If you use Sync you can very quickly rack up some very large costs. I only have 2TB of data, the storage space costs nothing but I've just had a nasty surprise with API call charges.
I use backblaze unlimited to back up my media server. I have never had a problem with. It just works. My only complaint is backblaze doesn't have a personal unlimited service that is compatible with linux. Their personal non business service not supporting linux, is the primary reason my media server runs on windows.
Online backup services is a great option for those who need offsite copies but once you get into 10s to 100s of terabytes, it can get expensive. Offsite replication via TrueNAS or SyncThing can be just as effective.
Excellent, informative video. Appreciate the bookmarks. I can see how to schedule the job (start time), however any ideas of how I can stop the syncing at a certaint time? Use case is an install with limited upload speed, want to avoid uploading 8am-11pm. Goal is to have larger upload jobs spread out over multiple nights when they happen.
10:38 the settings at the bottom such as exclusions and bandwidth scheduling, you can use chatgpt to generate those settings to your liking. No need to learn Rclone rules.
Thanks Tom for making this videos and a very interesting topic. Just one question maybe it is obvious for everyone but not for me sorry in advance ;-). Can you actually restore an encrypted file without having the TrueNAS that encrypted it in the first place or is this password and salt only relevant for the TrueNAS that encrypt/decrypt the files? I guess after seeing your video that you should be ok in case of disaster that the TrueNAS goes up in flames you can load the config incl. passwords etc. to another TrueNAS and restore from there right?
7:54 if you lose the app key and need to recover from this bucket, can’t you login to your BackBlaze account and just create a new key that has access to that bucket?
Great thank you! I already saved the app key into my password manager; but either way, I want learn how buckets work with backups. I use BackBlaze with my Synology and Hyperbackup. BackBlaze seems to have the best service-price-value for me.
Great Video as usual, I follow the video and setup a test of what will likely be my offsite backup. While I was running a disaster recovery test and loging all steps for the playbook on how to do it, I was haunted by question I can't test in my homelab as I don't have a spare server. I imagine the answer is of course you can, but if I setup encryption at the source (Truenas) can I recover files from B2 to a new instance of TrueNas? (Not sure how Truenas implemented the encryption buy I imagine they don't rely on Hardware nor will change from version to version so it will be backwards compatible, but I can't test it out.)
I’m curious about how you test your backups (a backup you can’t restore….). With hundreds of terabytes and a restore being all or nothing do you do a test restore at any stage?
The way I use this, it's already a backup of the backup. I backup my computers to my NAS, which then syncs it to Backblaze. The backup software I use verifies that all backups are valid and readable. Backblaze is there in case my house burns down.
@@VTOLfreak I treat my offsite backups the same way - things have gone really bad if I need it. What backup software are you using? I decided on Borgbackup to an offsite server that I own rather than using something like backblaze. I like the fact that I can selectively restore. I was wondering what sort of backup verification Truenas has or if the only way to test is to do a full restore.
@@scottmcnamara2458 I use Acronis True Image at home which also supports selective restore. In a corporate environment I would use Veeam or EMC Networker. By profession I'm a MSSQL DBA and some software like Idera SQL Safe allows you to live mount a database backup so you can pull out only the data you need instead of restoring the full backup. Most software can do this with files, not many can do the same trick with databases.
I love using Crashplan Small Business. Their pricing is great and you have UNLIMITED backup space. That's right UNLIMITED. I don't have to pay extra for more storage.
Great information. Does Backblaze still remove your files the backup if the source is not connected for a year? Or is there nowadays a delete never option?
I'm trying this right now with some encrypted veeam backup jobs. It seems my TrueNAS sits and ponders large (300GB) files for quite some time before uploading them (guessing it's hashing the files to 96MB chunks prior to upload?). Is there a way to speed this up? I see snapshot as a feature, but the veeam backup runs once daily and I have it set to start pretty much after that job would complete. This is of course only for the initial sync job and probably only for the incremental fulls as well.
To me, backup is lacking on TrueNAS. There does not seem to be any versioning available. Sync only gets the last file copied but does not allow you to retrieve version n-X. I run Cloudberry (MSP360) from my workstation (painfully slow) to do backups so that I can retrieve previous versions of a file as well I have it configured to keep the last version of a file for 60 days to recover accidental deletion
great video! but if i get it well: the encryption is done on the backblaze side right ? so at some point they have our unencrypted data? is is possible to upload files to backblaze using a pipe ? so i could tar -ac /mnt/data | age -d my_public_key | backblaze-b2 upload-file BucketName - filename.tar.encrypted ? ( for now i can't pass a - parameter to say "hey read stdin for the file content" )
How about compression? Is it possible to compress before encrypting in order to trade cpu for bandwidth? Of course for compressible content (not video, jpg images etc. :) )
For some reason when I use SYNC as the transfer mode in TrueNAS, I noticed that it backups everything again each time to B2. I just use COPY instead which performs more like a sync task. Could enabling encryption be causing it to perform this way?
It seems if the backup is encrypted there is no way to identify (and therefore no way to restore) just a single file or small hand full of files. Is that correct?
I currently have no way to test this, but this Dec 2018 TrueNAS forum post suggests a way to locate the rclone config file being used by FreeNAS (at the time), and pointing a standalone rclone browser using that cfg at the remote backup, allowing you to see decrypted content and filenames. The suggestion is to run "ps ax | grep rclone" while running a Free/TruNAS sync task. The result of that command will show you where the rclone cfg file FreeNAS is using is located. The original poster of the question later says they were able to use this technique to view backed up encrypted content(which feels very much like a bit of a hack). Here is a link to the post: www.truenas.com/community/threads/cloud-sync-restore-strategy.71989/
Which plan do you use? I question this, because I saw another video the other day, where the data where delete after a while. If this is happening that is not a good solution for a real backup. Thanks.
@@IPD2001 yes because with B2 you pay for the specific amount of storage space you use. No more, no less. (As well as upload and download) So you could have decided you don’t need a bunch of data, deleted it off your local systems, and you’d still be paying for it unless you delete it from Backblaze. It stays there until you remove it. The $X/month unlimited storage plans require you to plug in a drive periodically to prove you’ve still got the data. If you’ve decided to toss a drive full of data because you don’t want it anymore, they aren’t going to keep backing it up for you. That’s part of how they make it viable to offer unlimited storage plans.
And it's super expensive. My server would cost over a grand a year to keep backed up. Fine for business but I think most viewers of this channel are individual users so this suggestion makes no sense to me. Way beyond means.
Cost is not the same. Wasabi has a minimum charge. I have less than 1 TB going to wasabi (About 300 GB). My bill is $7 a month after base fee. My for Backblaze for that is about $1.80. There's also the minimum 90 day storage policy for deleted items. If you delete the data, you're charged for 90 days anyway.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS I figured they have some kind storage array that could take multiple failures before losing anything. But I was just being a smart ass. I appreciate the reply.
Their privacy policy calls out that they can see file metadata (e.g. names, type, size), and that data is exempted from their privacy policy. It’s not exactly zero trust, and they don’t even attempt to explain what they do with this data. I’m not sold.
@@stevetaylorftw If you follow the steps to encrypt the data as shown in the video, all file metadata will be encrypted and Backblaze will not be able to see anything about your files (not the filename, not the filetype, the file sizes will be wrong). It doesn't really matter what their privacy policy says about metadata at this point because the only metadata Backblaze can see is useless garbled (encrypted) text.
Tom, a few words of caution, remember where your YT channel started and why people subscribed in the first place. Happening a lot where channels start moving into higher and higher end gear, products or ideals and guess what, negative responses follow and loss of subscription. Backblaze along with all the other companies selling high drive-count systems are very expensive regardless of your opinions. Complicated systems that are your business model and choice is fine but myself and I am sure many others watch for things that are achieveable in cost-effective ways. Same goes for the flood of channels doing bloody VLOG's of talking crap. Now, I am not down-voting this post, its what you have seen as good content and for the narrow market using this product but as I have hinted, I have stopped watching in short time and asking myself why I subbed when I am closing the alerts and videos like this.
First of all, this is a video which shows how easy is to backup a TrueNAS data on some cloud object based storage. You can pick S3 if you want, the method will be the same. Once we said that, you can agree (or not) that this can be something people can consider as an option. I am not sure if you are aware, but the S3 has one of the most reliable storage plans, you can have reasonably good pricing for the service you will get. Maybe your data is not valuable enough to spend 25$ per month for 2TB of storage in S3, some people will consider this pricing just fine for the protection the S3 is providing, and no, you cannot build a similar product for less sometimes you just need to pay the price because it is way cheaper than if you try to do it yourself
TureNAS / FreeNAS is a very popular topic with both homelabs & enterprise users, and still brings lots of subscribers. If you don't like TrueNAS storage and really inexpensive ways to back up then i am not sure why you would subscribe to my channel. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
