Syncthing Combined with BackBlaze B2 (on TrueNAS Core)

User Stories
21

It is incremental aka saving the diff.

Another advantage of Duplicati (and all softwares implementing it) is deduplication: the same file present many times will only be saved once.

In my situation, a lot of users share files through various services, so deduplication saves a ton of space.

The downside is that if there’s corruption in the backup, all copies of the file are corrupted. But with two different backups + source files, I’m not too worried about this. You can also add parity files for error robustness to Duplicati I think.

1 Like
22

Yes, TrueNAS has deduplication as well, but I’ve been warned not to use it. A shame really, though luckily I have very few duplicates.

It’s a nice feature that Duplicati has a S/W parity function as well, I’ll certainly not forget about it.

1 Like
23

Sorry to bump an old thread here, but could I please clarify. Is this people using syncthing to perform backups to B2 and if so how?

I have on the back of my list of things to do for my TrueNAS Core server, to configure some kind of slow, monthly “just in case” backup of about 1TB of fairly critical data, over to B2 I messed around with this a while back but hadn’t got anywhere.

I recently did though, figure out how to have syncthing perform ‘backups’ for me (offsite syncing of a folder nightly, with fairly well configured snapshot expirations configured for the destination folder)

I’m happy enough with my final working system and would happily have syncthing do the same thing to B2 for me if I can. (I realise from my googling, syncthing isn’t the best choice for BackBlaze backups and it’s apparently hacky? That being said, I know it)

24

Hey there,

It’s quite simple, but you need to get the settings right, otherwise you’ll incur too many transactions with BackBlaze (tick 'Use --fast-list).

Here are some of the settings I use, I’ve been running this config for 3-5 months now and there doesn’t appear to be any issue.

For security I do encrypt files before sending them to backblaze.

I hope that helps.

Screenshot 2023-05-03 16.43.53
Screenshot 2023-05-03 16.43.531459×1209 104 KB

25

How do you configure syncthing at the remote end? I assume this is some kind of mapped folder or some such? Or does B2 literally offer some kind of Syncthing plugin web UI hosted at the remote end?

26

They operate separately, for me SyncThing has a mount point directed to a specific dataset. BackBlaze is configured to copy the files at certain intervals that are in that dataset.

1 Like
27

I’ve been considering experimenting to see what happens if I point Syncthing at a rclone mount target, initially local and eventually B2. But I expect some issues and potentially high transaction costs, so I doubt it will actually make sense to maintain this beyond the experimental stage but I’m also curious what will break.