Rdiff-backup is a great backup program. It is very easy to install it on a Synology NAS box like the Synology DS218+ Diskstation. You need just a couple of things:
- ssh access enabled on your Diskstation
- an internet connection
Do the following
- Log into the Synology web UI. Use the Package Center to install the Python3 package.
- ssh into your Synology NAS box.
- Run these commands. Some of them are long and wrap on my blog so I have added blank lines between the commands. Type each command on a single line.
sudo -i /volume1/@appstore/py3k/usr/local/bin/pip3 install rdiff-backup cd /bin ln -s /volume1/@appstore/py3k/usr/local/bin/rdiff-backup ln -s /volume1/@appstore/py3k/usr/local/bin/rdiff-backup-delete ln -s /volume1/@appstore/py3k/usr/local/bin/rdiff-backup-statistics
Test and Use rdiff-backup
That’s it. Rdiff-backup should now run. Try running “rdiff-backup –version”
art@dumbo:~$ rdiff-backup --version rdiff-backup 2.0.3
If you see that message, everything is good to go. Enjoy rdiff-backup!
So this is a remote hard drive?
Yes. It’s about half the size of a shoe box and sits on the floor under my desk. I put a pair of 4 TB hard drives in it. When I back up my files and photos to the Synology Diskstation, every file and photo gets written to both drives. If (heaven forbid) one drive dies, the other drive has everything on it.
With two 4 TB drives which are mirrors of each other, I have about 3.5 TB usable storage. I have about 25,000 photos on it, in addition to backing up multiple computers. That is using about 25% of the space.
That’s all a foreign language to me but thanks for including me. I’ll send it Barrett.
Have a really good weekend. J
Hi Art,
Thank you for this guide. I’m running a DS218 but I can’t get rdiff-backup installed.
Would you mind give me some hints on how to proceed?
Additional to your description I had to install pip first, it was not installed with the python package from DSM.
Afterwards running
$ pip install rdiff-backup
leads to several errors:
unable to execute ‘/usr/local/aarch64-unknown-linux-gnueabi/bin/aarch64-unknown-linux-gnueabi-ccache-gcc’: No such file or directory
ERROR: Failed building wheel for rdiff-backup
It looks like rdiff-backup has to be built on the NAS but there is no compiler around?
How come that DS218 and DS218+ are so different?
BTW:
$ uname -a
says
Linux DS218 4.4.59+ #24922 SMP Thu Mar 12 13:01:18 CST 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux synology_rtd1296_ds218
Any help would be appreciated.
Regards, Stefan
Stefan,
I don’t quite know what to suggest. According to the web Control Panel, my Diskstation has DSM version 6.2.2-24922 Update 4. All I did was run the few instructions above.
From a shell prompt, I get this:
artzemon@penguin:~ $ uname -a
art@dumbo:~$ uname -a
Linux dumbo 4.4.59+ #24922 SMP PREEMPT Mon Aug 19 12:13:37 CST 2019 x86_64 GNU/Linux synology_apollolake_218+
We definitely have different base software.