I’ve read through the forums here about seeding from an external storage medium but I’m still a little confused how it works completely. It seems instead of simply copying the files to the urbackup server, I have to create a temporary client on my local network, then add the backup path of the external drive to this client. I would then install the client on the remote PC and add the appropriate paths there also. I understand that enabling client-side hashing is required for this to work but what now do I do with the temporary client I created on my local network? I can’t remove this obviously since it’ll remove the initial seeding too. This seems like a sloppy approach to something that shouldn’t be this trivial.
After your temporary client has finished a full backup start a full backup on the remote client that the data on the external drive came from. This should complete very quickly as the data is already on the server.
When finished you can safely remove the temporary client.
I don’t use a temporary client myself. I just add the external drive to the backup of a local PC (on the same network as the backup server) and remove it from the backup paths after the remote client has completed.
Seems simple enough to me.
Ok, but I was under the assumption that removing the client (or just removing the backup path from an existing client) would also remove this data? I guess I’m not as well versed how urbackup uses junctions as I thought.
If you remove the client or backup path BEFORE the remote client is backed up you may cause the data to be removed from the server. I suppose it depends on how much space the server has and how often cleanup is run etc.
As long as the remote client backs up before removing the temporary client or path you will be fine.