Introduction
I’m setting up backups for my all of my pies . To store the backups, I’m connecting the pi, pis, pies to my NAS using the NFS protocol. I couldn’t get sshsf to work with my Synology NAS. It was such a pain I gave up.
Backups up to the NAS let’s me keep my backups in one, redundant location. The backups are made using a back up tool that makes backups of pies while they are still running, Raspberry Pi, Realtime Backups. This way my FreePBX VoIP system and this WordPress site, etc. will survive when their SDs don’t.
Between setting up the NAS to receive the backups via NFS, remembering how to do a mount command and finding a line where someone figured out fstab for me, it took me about 40 minutes. Probably the shortest trip of this journey.
Procedure
Note: don’t forget to open the firewall ports for NFS (I always forget to open the ports and then troubleshoot for hours)
Port 111 (TCP & UDP) and 2049 (TCP & UDP) 892 (TCP & UDP).
What I did: (details on how to do each item are in the links, they wrote it better than I can)
- I went into the Synology NAS and turned on NFS for the specific share, locking it down to the IP of each Pi.
- On the NAS I setup a folder to connect to.
- On the NAS I created a user with the same name as my user on the pies and gave it permissions read and write to the folder.
- On each of the pies – I setup a directory under /mnt. I called it pibak /mnt/backups. use the mounting point and folder name you like.
- For each of the pies I mkdir a new directory. Then tested for permissions and made sure it all looked ok.
- I setup Fstab, ran the umount -a command until I changed the syntax to fix all the errors, rebooted and tested the mount to make sure the directory mounted correctly.
Commands
Here is the mount command that worked for me, after I made the directory pibak:
sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.28:/volume1/backups /mnt/backups
Here is the ftsab line that worked for me once I could get the directory mounted:
192.168.1.28/volume1/pibak /mnt/pibak nfs auto,rw,bg,hard,intr 0 0
fstab is located at /etc/fstab
Test fstab by unmounting and then doing a mount -a. No errors means you are good to go and will survive a reboot. Now reboot and test.
Resources
Setting up the Synology:
How to access files on Synology NAS within the local network (NFS)
Assigning permissions:
Assign NFS Permissions
Getting the pi connected & mounted:
Synology Settings for NFS
Dealing with access denied even though they mounted (not all had this issue):
[SOLVED] Connecting to Synology NAS with NFS – Permission Denied?
Verifying the fstab without a reboot –How to verify fstab file
Bonus
Other sources I’ve used in the past to setup a pi NFS server and hook to it to another pi running as a mini nas server with ssd
setup a NFS server
How to Setup Raspberry Pi NFS Server
connect client to the NFS server –
Connecting to an NFS Share on the Raspberry Pi