Oct 222020
 

So I recently bought a Western Digital PR4100 NAS drive to backup my Linux Desktop and Laptop after losing 2 external usb drives in about 2 years.  I had always used rsnapshot to back them up.  While poking around the WD NAS via ssh, I realized it has a binary for rsnapshot installed on it that is relatively recent.  I couldn’t find any of the config files though and I came up with this solution.

The first thing you need to do is set up the sshd user on the WD NAS so you have shell access.

The second thing you need to do is to configure rsync via ssh from your computer to copy the rsnapshot config files into place.  This will need done daily because the WD NAS drive reboots at 3am EST every day.  That reboot only lasts a few minutes so what I did was created a cron job that passes the sshd users password via sshpass to create a non-interactive shell in order to rsync the files.  You will also need to copy the entire /home/root/.ssh folder and all its files to your local server and also install them using rsync because the mycloud device also deletes those files on reboot.  It looks something like this:

Create file sync-mycloud-confs.sh containing:

rsync --rsh='sshpass -p PASSWORD ssh -l sshd' /path/to/rsnapshot/*.conf MyCloud_hostname_or_IP_Address:/home/root/
rsync --rsh='sshpass -p PASSWORD ssh -l sshd' /path/to/rsnapshot/.ssh/ MyCloud_hostname_or_IP_Address:/home/root/.ssh/

In the above you will need to replace PASSWORD with your sshd users password, replace /path/to/rsnapshot/*.conf with your path to them and MyCloud_hostname_or_IP_Address with whatever method you use to ssh into your mycloud device, I use ip address btw.  I may try to find a better place to store these files so they don’t get deleted on device reboots but for tonight, it works there so thats what I am going with before I forget.

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