Urbackup Truenas core

Have setup a new truenas core server first time and installed the urbackup plugin its showing as running and I can access the web page but it will not find any clients, have reinstalled some of the client software 1 pc and a bunch of laptops all on same network clients all windows based(was using urbackup on openmediavault) this worked fine. On the post install notes on truenas -

  1. Stop the jail
  2. Map the folder /mnt/backups/urbackup
  3. Start the jail
  4. Browse to http://jail-ip:55414 and configure an admin user.

What does map the folder mean, is this to view the backups on network or set the save location to urbackup, what do I have to do?

It means that you should configure a mount point for the jail so that the dataset you have created for urbackup to store backups in is available to the jail.
You canā€™t change a jailā€™s mount points while it is running, so thatā€™s why the first instruction is to stop the jail.

Hi thanks for you help will give it a try

Shout if you need a specific example and I can show you how my urbackup jail is configured.

I got syncthing working eventually so applying what I did on that to urbackup but not working.

Created a Dataset in the pool ā€˜UrBackupDataā€™ then stopped the urbackup plugin and went to Mount Points and added Source as the UrBackupData I created then at destination set /mnt/Tank/iocage/jails/urbackup/root/mnt/backups/urbackup as per plugin /mnt/backups/urbackup then on saving get Error - Destinantion directory must be empty, tree shows two folder in urback clients and urbackup_tmp_files.

What have I done wrong?

The destination directory is a ā€œmount pointā€ and as such must always be empty.

The place you mount the dataset in the jail is up to you within limits. On my TrueNAS server, I have a dataset called ā€˜urbackupā€™.
The dataset is located at

/mnt/freenas/urbackup

I logged in to my urbackup jail with:

iocage console urbackup

and created the mount point:

root@urbackup:~ # mkdir /mnt/backups

Then, I shut down the jail and edited the jail mount points to look like this:

From the command line, it looks like this:

root@freenas:/mnt/freenas # ll urbackup/
drwxr-xr-x  8 urbackup  urbackup  8 Sep  6 10:14 urbackup/

root@freenas:/mnt/freenas # iocage console urbackup

root@urbackup:~ # ls -l /mnt/backups/
drwxr-xr-x  8 urbackup  urbackup  8 Sep  6 10:14 urbackup

The other thing you must do is to add a urbackup user and urbackup group in TrueNAS with the same user ID and group ID as the user and group has inside the jail, otherwise urbackup will not be able to use the mount point.

root@urbackup:~ # ls -ln /mnt/backups/
drwxr-xr-x  8 891  891  8 Sep  6 10:14 urbackup

Then all you need to do is make sure that urbackup is configured correctly so that it knows where it should store backups:

Hi, Thankyou for posting the guide/info Itā€™s now up and running thanks for the detailed post.

Excellent, Iā€™m glad to hear that you are up and running.

Should I be able to see the backup file in the source from the mount point? For example, @grizewald said that his source mount folder is /mnt/freenas/urbackup when I go into the dataset with my regular account should/can I see the files that get backed up or are they hidden?
Also, what is the point of the source mount?

I assume (and hope!) that you are running urbackup in a jail on your NAS.

Assuming that, let me explain. A jail is like a lightweight virtual machine running a copy of the NAS serverā€™s operating system. However, a jail does not have any access to the host machineā€™s file system, This keeps the host machineā€™s file system isolated from whatever you install in the jail. The jailed application cannot accidentally or maliciously damage the hostā€™s file system.

To give the jailed application access to part of the hostā€™s file system, you have to explicitly make part of the host file system available to the jail. In my setup, I have the following set up in the jailā€™s configuration:

Source: /mnt/freenas/urbackup Destination: /mnt/veryfastpool/iocage/jails/urbackup/root/mnt/backups
In the jail, the directory on the host appears as /mnt/backups. In the urbackup configuration, I have the Backup storage path set to: /mnt/backups/urbackup

In the jail, listing the contents of /mnt/backups/urbackup shows a directory for each of my clients, plus some other directories used by urbackup. Under each client directory there is a directory created with a date-time format for each backup session.

If I look in /mnt/freenas/urbackup/urbackup from the NAS host operating system, I see the same thing.

If you dig down further into the directory tree, you will find more directories which contain files or links to files in other directories. Urbackup has a complex file structure which stores files which have not changed as links back to the first copy of the file which was stored and other metadata which urbackup uses to re-create the entire client file system from a combination of full and incremental backups. Because of this, itā€™s not advisable to try using urbackupā€™s internal storage to recover files but you should use the urbackup client instead as it knows how things are stored.

I hope that makes things clearer, shout if it doesnā€™t!

Yes, I understand now thank you. Do I need a server URL, if so what should I choose for my server URL? My client also says no internet server configured, how do I fix that?

Great, glad I could help!

The server URL should be something like: http://urbackup:55414/ where urbackup is the name by which your jail is known on your own internal network. This is normally the same as the ā€œNameā€ field in the jail configuration on the NAS. You need to have your jailā€™s IP address assigned by a DHCP server on your network to be able to refer to your urbackup jail by name (by ticking the ā€œDHCP Autoconfigure IPV4ā€ box in the jail configuration). Otherwise, just put the jailā€™s IP address in the URL.

You only need to configure the Internet tab on the urbackup server if you want to be able to access urbackup from outside your home network. If you do that, you will need to open a port in your routerā€™s firewall and forward incoming connections to your jail. This also means that you need your router to have a fixed IP address with a DNS name which can be resolved on the Internet. As this is a big can of worms security-wise, I donā€™t use this feature and keep my incoming firewall closed for all traffic. I donā€™t have any need to access my urbackup server from outside my home network. While this might sound attractive, as soon as the open port on your router is discovered, you will have people trying to break in all the time.

I see where I was having trouble, I didnā€™t have the jail running by DHCP. I finally got it to work know. Thanks for your help!

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My pleasure. Glad to hear everything is now working.

Iā€™ve been using urbackup for quite a few years now and it has proved to be very reliable and once configured, it just does what it should and keeps all my machines safely backed up without me having to do a thing. Itā€™s a great piece of software!

I do have one more question. How do configure the server for when I have to access/restore? I have this for the server:


But when I press the access/restore through the client PC, it will open a page like this:
http://urbackup:55414/#tokens0ā€¦
but nothing will load. did I miss a step when setting up?

I didnā€™t need to configure anything to be able to access my backups. I donā€™t recognise the second screen shot that you have in your message, probably because I am still running version 2.4.15 of urbackup - Iā€™ve not seen any reason to upgrade to the latest release. The option ā€œClients try to connect via Internet/active clientā€ is not something I have, but I have not enabled any Internet functionality in the configuration. If you have checked the box ā€œEnable Internet Modeā€ in Settings->General->Internet, turn it off.

If Iā€™m logged in to the urbackup serverā€™s web page and I click the main tab marked ā€œBackupsā€, that gives me a list of my clients. Clicking a client gives me a list of all the recent backups. Clicking on a line in that view gives me an option to Download a ZIP of the files contained in that backup, or, if I just click the line, it will list all the files in the backup and allow me to download a specific file or a ZIP of a folderā€™s contents. At any point, clicking the button marked ā€œListā€ will show me all of the versions of that file or directory from most recent to oldest.

Okay, I am running 2.5.31 What I was trying to do before was just do that client side so I didnā€™t have to log into my sever, not like its much work. Here are some more full screenshots of what I have for settings and what I was trying to do.

Then I tried to access it client side by right clicking the application then selecting acess/restore like this:
image

which brings me to this page when I click it:

@grizewald Does UrBackUp delete old files after a certain period of time?

The browser says that it cannot resolve the name ā€˜urbackupā€™. If your client is on your local network but cannot resolve the name, then the clientā€™s DNS settings are incorrect.
Whatever provides DHCP on your network should also be the DNS server for the clients. That lets it resolve the IP addresses of things that it has provided IP addresses for.

Yes, urbackup eventually deletes old backups. This is controlled by the combination of settings that you entered on the settings page and is formed by a combination of the Interval and maximum number of full and incremental backups that you have defined.
The program will always make sure that a recent backup is still available, it doesnā€™t just blindly delete things after a time period.