UrBackup: My thoughts, and how to PROPERLY get it working.
UrBackup is a great piece of software…if you know what you’re doing. It took me hours today to get it installed, and it works great…if you did it right.
In this rambling/tutorial, I’ll tell you about my thoughts on UrBackup, and how to properly get it set up.
First, the proper set up.
My UrBackup server resides on a box with 1.25 TB of HDD/SSD space, 3 GB of RAM, and Ubuntu Server 16.04.2. Really, the instructions here can apply to any setup.
For the first part of the setup, follow UrBackup’s guide for your OS, install it, and head to the web GUI, usually on port 55414.
Download the client for your OS, but don’t install it, yet. Instead, add the hostname of your computer for UrBackup to look for, then set up your installation. If all goes well, UrBackup should be backing up your files in >5 minutes.
Oh, pro tip! On the initial backup, UrBackup will do a full file backup, and then an incremental image backup. And, if you have lots of files, it’ll take a LONG time, depending on your local connection to your backup server. And I mean it! I started an initial backup of my desktop 2 hours ago, and it’s 43% done with the file backup, on my Wi-Fi. It’s one fast process, if you can tell. (that was sarcasm)
Alright, moving on to my thoughts. After 4 attempts of setting the damn thing up, I so far like UrBackup. Since it does a full image backup, you can supposedly download the UrBackup Rescue CD, and get a “bare metal restoration”, sorta like doing Macrium Reflect. That’s pretty cool.
The web GUI provides lots of nice information, like status of ongoing backups in real-time, real-time logs, and a plethora of options I’ll never have the time to configure. There’s only one part that I don’t like, being the Statistics page. It doesn’t update in real time. Yikes!
Nonetheless, if you truly want real time disk monitoring, get yourself a snazzy copy of netdata (Linux only). We good? We good.
I’ll have to see in my testing how UrBackup does, as I have another 3 machines I’d like to get set up with UrBackup. To make sure my Wi-Fi router doesn’t secretly kill me, I’m doing 1-2 devices at once, just to reduce the total Wi-Fi load on my network. So far, I like the software, but it’s the “honeymoon phase”, so to speak. I’ll have to wait another week or two for the “honeymoon phase” to wear off, and see how things work in practice.
Anywhom, quick migration update. Things are almost done! If you’ve been stalking status.owenthe.ninja, you’ll see that I worked a fair bit on website migration. All that remains is another old website, and the minimal Damn Small Linux mirror. I’ll need to spin up a VM, just to see what files are required to get things rocking and rolling.
More posts are coming down the, well, post pipes. I’ve got a LG G2 coming, so I’ll report on getting CyanogenMod on that. I’ve had FreeNAS in production for some time now, so I’ll do a proper review of that. And, of course, the full UrBackup review. Lots of them coming!
See you all in the next post…
