Using Unraid for rsync (backintime) backup and External Drive Replacement

I decided to replace a bunch of external hard drives with an UNRAID server. Setup to work with rsync and backintime backup software for Linux. Managed to sort out an error with rsync and the samba shares not liking files that start with “._”. This is a great use of my UNRAID system.

UNRAID Update 2 – ZX-DU99D4 V1.11 X99 Motherboard Dual Xeon E5-2650LV3 with 64GB of Ram

I have the base components of my new UNRAID server. I got a Chinese X99 dual CPU motherboard off eBay, it’s the ZX-DU99D4 V1.11. Which I will be running two Xeon E5-2650LV3 with 64GB of Ram (both used of eBay). This will be a great base system for playing with VMs and dockers etc in UNRAID using the ZX-DU99D4, as well as running backups.

Unraid and BackInTime over SMB

I have recently setup a secondary server using Unraid to run backups (including with BackInTime). (I will do a full post about it at some point.) I will use this server as a BackInTime server for my Linux workstation, and the Time Machine server for my Mac laptops. Getting it working with the Macs was a bit of a pain, but I got there in the end. But today I shall talk about getting it to work with BackInTime, which I think I have now done.

I ran into a problem thar the standard rsync configuration used by BackInTime was not able to copy files that started with an ‘_’ from the workstation over to the smb share on the Unraid server. This was because when rsync made the temporary ‘._*’ file it would fail as smb doesn’t allow that file name. This was a problem because some of the software libraries that I was using for projects have files that start with ‘_’. So the result was that the snapshots were missing those files and completing with errors. Not ideal. The actual number of files that this affects is fairly low and I could probably live with it, but really it would be better if a solution could be found.

The solution

It turned out that the solution was fairly straight forward in the end. I had to disable the vfs objects fruit and streams_xattr for the share. Then it worked perfectly. The problem is that unraid sets those automatically for each share. So I have to manually delete them, and then restart samba each time I reboot the server. Fortunately that will not be very often.

Still, it would be better to find a more permanent solution. I am currently looking for that, and have posted to a couple of forums to see if anyone knows if it is possible to have custom settings for a share that are not overwritten each time the array is started.