Samba shares and backups

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Hi!,

I’m a newcomer to FreedomBox. I first learned about this project a couple of weeks ago, when browsing the topics of Debconf '21. I must say that I’m impressed of the result so far, so thank you! I also believe that this initiative has a lot of potential.

Moving into practical issues, I deployed a FreedomBox instance in my local network, and started to play arround with it, with a focus on backups and file sharing, which are my personal priorities. Everything seemed solid, but I noticed that Samba shares are not covered by the “Backups” module [1].

I wonder whether there are plans to cover Samba shares backups in the future, and if there is any known particular issue.

Thanks in advance,

Guillermo

[1] FreedomBox/Manual/Backups - Debian Wiki

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From the code it looks like backup/restore for Samba (registry share configuration) has been supported since FreedomBox 19.22, and the manual page has just been slow to catch up. I haven’t actually tried it myself, though.

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I believe we currently support only configuration backup/restore for Samba. Backup/restore of folders shared with Samba is definitely a good to have.

We have planned to implement backup/restore of arbitrary folders on FreedomBox for sure. Then doing this for Samba folders automatically would be even better.

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Thanks for the pointer @sunil . Indeed, having the ability to backup any directory in the FreedomBox installation would cover this topic’s use case.
@lifeform, I’ve setup backups for all the applications in my installations, and Samba shares are not included.
I’ll keep an eye on backup: Implement ability to backup abitrary folders (#1812) · Issues · FreedomBox / FreedomBox · GitLab.

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Sorry for bumping this 2.5 year-old thread. Apparently there was no activity on this issue.

A Pioneer running on an SD card might not have so much disk space of samba, but with an external disk, samba is perfectly usable and automatic backups of data would be extremely useful.

Was this considered lower priority so far? Or are there issues?

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This issue (backup samba and maybe other folders) is the next step to make my Freedomboxes reliable servers. As a newbie to Freedombox and Linux I made progress in setting up these systems and they make a lot of joy, being able to host everything at home. I also moved the btrfs sections to a ssd’s, which takes a weak spot away. But without a good backup the whole project is in danger to fail, and this would be very sad, since Freedombox is very promising and has a lot of potential.

Is there anything in progress or do I have to dig into borg backup documentation and try and error?

Thanks for some information! Again, I deeply appreciate all the work that you all do as developers and maintainers!

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