In February 2013, a client purchased a Synology NAS. They hired me to set up their mail server to back up to it each night. In addition, I wrote them a restore script. After an email address is specified, it presents a list of available snapshots and provides the ability to restore mailbox contents. It is now September, the solution has been working flawlessly, so I’m sharing a few details.
To fully preserve the permissions, ownership, and metadata, mounting the Synology via NFS was the best option. A potential issue with NFS is that the mail server would be hung if the Synology was unavailable. Because the NAS is only used for backups, I chose to automount the NFS share. That reduces the window for NFS hang exposure to about 20 minutes a day.
To configure automounter, I added this entry to /etc/fstab:
10.10.10.10:/volume1/mail /mnt/synology nfs rw,noauto 0 0
and these entries to /etc/rc.conf:
amd_enable=”YES”
amd_flags=”-a /.amd_mnt -l syslog /mnt/synology /etc/amd.synology”
and this to /etc/amd.synology:
/defaults type:=nfs;opts:=rw,grpid,resvport,vers=3,proto=tcp
* rhost:=synology;rfs:=/volume1/mail/snapshots
Once the automounter (amd) was properly configured, it was a simple matter to install and configure rsnapshot. Each night, the periodic scripts triggers the backup which automounts the NAS. Shortly after the backups conclude, amd disconnects it.