Backing Up

Looking to backup my RISC OS machines. Until I can afford a NAS, can I throw a FAT32 2TB drive into my Titanium and share it over my home network?

I’ve just plugged a FAT32 device into my ARMX6. The “share” menu item is greyed out.
RO5.29.

By default RISC OS only supports the RISC OS only (bar one Linux Python implementation) ShareFS networking. If the option is greyed out, a *Share command placed in an obey run at boot may be needed.

If you want other types of machines to be able to access it like a NAS, you need to be running Samba or NFS servers, which are incredibly flaky on RISC OS, and not very fast, so I would not recommend them.

A Pi 4B running Linux with a drive connected to it’s USB3 port makes a great NAS, Linux supports both Samba for Windows PC’s and NFS for Linux clients, either of which can be used by RISC OS (SMBv1 must be enabled), it has Gigabit Ethernet and 5GHz WiFi, so is pretty quick too.

What are you backing up?

Not an elegant solution but I zip the parts of the system I want to backup into separate zip folders namely:

!Boot
Applications
Home (I’ve made a home folder which I’ve then split into docs, photos, etc, just to make me feel more organised)

then copy these into pCloud, and then copy these from pCloud to my Mac.

I just ordered a 4kn 2TB drive. I would like to back up my Titanium, Pi4B and my Pi3B systems.

A couple of points, in the hope that you may find them useful:

For a NAS, you only need a Raspberry Pi and a PSU in addition to your drive. I use OpenMediaVault running on a RasPi 3B+ and I’ve found it very effective. I have two drives, and an rsync task runs at 02:00 every day to copy the contents of drive 1 to drive 2. It gives a useful level of resistance to data loss.

My DBack and DRest apps can back up all RISC OS files and directories to anything that can store a few files, and restore them with all file type info preserved. https://davehigton.me.uk

You could use David Pilling’s ArcTree and create optical discs like CDs, DVDs or Blu-Rays from there (depending on the amount of data you need to store). Great for archiving, because you can read it back on any machine with filetypes inact for e.g. Emulator usage. Personally, I would never trust magnetic media or SSDs for long-term storage, only for quick backups.

For NAS recommendations, I retired my big 4-bay Netgear after its PSU broke – of course it was non-standard, so I bought a new really expensive PSU and switched the NAS on one last time to transfer the data to somewhere else. Now I have OpenMediaVault on a RPi4 with Linux and a 4 TiB Samsung SSD. Works great with FTPc and Sunfish and LanManFS (so I can access things from really old RISC OS 3.1 machines up to the newest RISC OS 5 ones as well as standard PCs) without any bigger problems apart from possible file naming issues when dealing with top-bit characters.

I wouldn’t recommend a RISC OS machine as the “transfer server” because if you are unlucky neither ShareFS nor Samba nor Moonfish will be stable enough to reliably transfer large amounts of data in an acceptable time frame.

Thanks for your input. I will avoid using the Titanium as a backup server. I’m looking into a Synology DS923+ eventually.

I’m looking into a Synology DS923+ eventually.

I’m running a Synology for backup. It’s using SMB1 to connect to Lanman98. However it keeps telling me there’s an SMB2 upgrade I need to install, which I’m not doing in case it disables SMB1.

Before you buy a new NAS you should check for SMB1 support – or commit to using NFS instead. Personally I’ve had issues with NFS over the years, mainly due to username/password issues, and file permissions.

This is why for a small home system where you don’t need hardware RAID, the Raspberry Pi is much better. You have full control over the SMB and NFS versions supported, and the usernames and permissions for NFS.

I can conform all that David Ruck has said in the above posting. Plus any Synology device you can buy will run out of support in not many years, and who knows how often it will be updated during its support lifetime – whereas OMV and Linux have frequent updates.

All in all, a RasPi and OMV offer you a cheaper, more versatile and better supported option than a ready-made commercial NAS appliance.

But do make sure you get an adequate power supply.