Backup WHM Server to Synology NAS with Rsync

[DevTeam9200]

Hi All,

I been doing some searching across net and the answers are mixed. I want to use WHM Native backup solution only. I.e. NOT Jet backup and want to backup all accounts to a Synology NAS. I was hoping to use rsync so I could do incremental to minimise bandwidth each night.

I have 2 questions the documentation and forums do not clearly answer:

1. If I use rsync as remote destination backup source to the synology nas will it work? Has any one tested and confirmed this is working ? Or is SFTP the only way to do this to Synlogy?

2. If I am able to use rysnc remote backup destination, can I "remove local backups" from the server default /backup folder and in case of restore , be able to restore directly from the remote desitnation using the native restore in WHM ? I.e. without having to manually first copy the file from remote rsync / sftp destination to the /backup folder first . Can it pull the remote backup file in the restore process directly?

I hope that is clear and do let me know if we are able to assist. Thanks team.

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! I'd be happy to answer these for you.

1 - I don't see a reason why the rsync option wouldn't work. You just need a host/IP, username, password, and directory in order to configure the rsync transport option, so as long as you can connect to your system with an SSH user, I'd expect that to work fine.

2 - No, you'd have to get the file back to the WHM machine before attempting the restore, as outlined here: Remote Restoration | cPanel & WHM Documentation

Let me know if you need more details!

 

[DevTeam9200]

Hi Thanks for the update. To confirm its not working.

I am getting this issue:

Error: Validation for transport “nas01” failed: Could not create path directory “whm8/”: child exited with code 1

To also add to the above to share some light, I am rsync on port 33322 and its all open and working, also I change to SFTP as destination and all working (i.e. no blocks of firewall, etc etc etc) .

Any assistance to the above would be greatly appreciated? Where could I see more in depth logs of issue would be a good start.

 

[cPRex]

Thanks for the additional details. Just to confirm, are you able to run this command on the server to manually connect?

ssh [email protected] -p 33322

or this command, if you're testing directly with rsync:

rsync testfile [email protected]:whm8/testfile -p 33322

If those are working manually but not from the backup transporter, I'd recommend checking the cPanel error log file at /usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log to see if that provides more details.

Another possible issue is that the remote user doesn't have full shell access, as our implementation of rsync does require shell. More details on that can be found here:

https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us...lementations-without-full-shell-capabilities?

 

[4est]

I am having a similar problem
I tried the "testfile" but I get:

rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1344) [sender=3.1.2]

rsync /root/dan/ [email protected]:/dantest/ -p 222

I can ssh to that [email protected]

 

[cPRex]

A couple thoughts on that - you may not want to try an entire directory for the test as it would be easier and quicker to just use a single file. I also don't think you need the first slash in "/dantest/" as your "dan" user likely isn't storing files in the root directory - that path is relative to your user's access to the remote system.

I'm picturing something more like this:

rsync testfile [email protected]:dantest/ -p 222

Do you know if the user has shell access as well on the remote system?

 

[4est]

Unexpected remote arg: [email protected]:dantest/
rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1344) [sender=3.1.2]

The user does have shell access, I can connect using ssh

 

[4est]

could this be because of the rsync version?
rsync version 3.1.2 protocol version 31

 

[cPRex]

My CentOS 7 has this version, so it would seem we're using very similar versions:

# rpm -qa | grep -i rsync
rsync-3.1.2-10.el7.x86_64

Is the remote version of rsync also similar? I really don't have a good answer as to why the rsync command itself would not be connecting.