I recently finished building a new FreeNAS machine, my first actually. One of the goals for the machine was to use it to backup my servers. My requirements were the following:
- It needs to be able to backup an entire Linux server ( / ) but some paths needs to be excluded like /dev and /proc.
- It should not put too much strain on the server that is being backed up.
- The FreeNAS server needs to initiate the backup. It’s behind NAT and I don’t want to open up any ports.
- It would be very beneficial if the UID and GID of the files and folders are kept. So this is not strictly a requirement but I very much would like this feature.