Rdiff-backup

This article describes how to setup rdiff-backup on a QNAP NAS device. This is useful if you want to make incremental backups of your server. This recipe has been tested on a TS-509 Pro.

QNAP Server Setup

Install Ipkg on the qnap server. See Install Optware IPKG, but briefly:

• Go to System Tool -> qpkg -> Get qpkg
• Right click "Optware IPKG (Itsy Package Management System)" copy and paste link to new browser
• Download the software and then install as fireware update

Update ipkg and install rdiff-backup

ipkg update
ipkg list | grep rdiff-backup
ipkg install py26-rdiff-backup

Find out the version of rdiff-backup because your other rdiff-backup software will need to match exactly. Note it has a slightly different name than normal.

rdiff-backup-2.6 -V

Make a symbolic link in the paths so that we can call rdiff-backup rather than rdiff-backup-2.6 from the shell

ln -s /opt/bin/rdiff-backup-2.6 /opt/bin/rdiff-backup

Test our command

rdiff-backup -V

Make a soft link so that it can be accessed by ssh

ln -s /opt/bin/rdiff-backup-2.6 /bin/rdiff-backup

Test this on a remote machine

ssh admin@yourqnapserver rdiff-backup -V

How to use rdiff-backup

The software is quite simple and there is a good guides here: http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/examples.html .