Question about restoring large backups

Restore
1

Hello there, first of all, thanks for this great free software, i’ve been using it for over a year and has proven really useful more than once.

I’m writting here cause yesterday i was struck by doubt. I’ve been using urbackup largely to restore single files/folders that got deleted by users, I backup daily a 4 tb fileserver. The problem is, the restore process (download as a large .zip or restore single files) seems extremely unpractical in the event that my whole fileserver dies/gets stolen/etc, what would the correct procedure be in order to restore all the 4 tb? Just download a huge 4 tb .zip (maybe in parts, i rode somewhere that it download 4gb parts) and unzip it in a new network share? Restore folder by folder?

I’m a bit lost here, any help would be apreciated.

Thanks in advance and thanks again for this great piece of software!

2

If you’re using the 2.x branch you can restore directly via the urbackup client. the only downside is that you have to make at least one backup with the new system to access the restore points. (even if its only the empty directory)

1 Like
3

What is this 2.x branch? in the downloads section the latest thing is 1.4… https://www.urbackup.org/download.html

I’m currently using that, I don’t mind upgrading to get better functionality, but if that’s not possible, the original question still stands.

Thanks!

4

See e.g. here Restore entire folder

Depending on your server settings it may use symlinks to more efficiently store the backups. If yes you should test if your restore method (WebDAV, Windows shares, SCP, …) has an option to copy the symlinks as folders and to follow them.

5

Thanks for the reply uroni! so, if I understand this correctly:

I’m running urbackup on a ubuntu server vm, if i want to restore/access my backups from a windows server I should configure samba on the ubuntu vm, share the backups directory, and then copy/sync the contents there with my windows share (which would empty in the situation i had to reinstall).

Is this correct?

6

Yes, for samba this applies with respect to the symlinks: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5120/how-do-you-make-samba-follow-symlink-outside-the-shared-path

With 2.0.x (forum posts in testing category) it also backups file meta-data, which is why it has a build in restore.

7

Alright! Just a last offtopic question. Is it safe to roll out 2.x in production? I think the built in restore is just a killer feature.

8

I’d say so. It is quite close to release.