Two months ago I bought a QNAP TS209 together with 2 500GB Samsung HD (actually I already had a spare one..) What driven me to the final choice was that these units from qnap run a basic Linux distribution that can be easily "expanded" using dpkg (and I really love to play with Linux stuff).
The TS209 is very good but, what I was really missing once I installed and configured the unit, was a good backup program. I have just two computers but I really don't like to have backup programs installed on both of them.
On my old Linux-station I used to ran backuppc to save other pc's data. For this reason I "googled" around a little to find some experience running this program on the TS209. Unfortunately I didn't found anything.
Because of I didn't want to spend too much time to verify if the TS209 hardware was too limited to run backuppc I skipped the option to try to compile backuppc from sources. For this reason I installed the minimal Debian distribution shipped with the slimserver package from progressive AV (Here you can find the package and the installing instruction)
First of all I changed the apt/sources.list file to switch from the "etch" distribution to unstable.
Basically:
#> chroot /shares/MD0_MOUNT/etch
#> vi /etc/apt/sources.list
and then change from etch to unstable
After that you can update to get the last version of backuppc.
#> apt-get update
#> apt-get install backuppc
BackupPc depends from Apache and smbclient so apt will install these two software also.
After the installation/configuration of Apache remember to change the default port of Apache from 80 (that is already taken by the "original" Apache instance ran by QNAP firmware at startup) to something else.
#> vi /etc/apache/port
change the port and then
#> /etc/init.d/apache start
#> /etc/init.d/backuppc start
Now you can connect to backuppc using your browser
http://nas_addess:port/backuppc
To test the installation I configured Backuppc to use the smb transfer method (both my computer are windows based) to backup the "Documents and the Desktop"folders of my two LAN users using the administrative share C$ (see backuppc site for more information about this)
During the first trial I was using standard compression settings (level 3) and I was tring to backup a folder of about 8GB. The result wasn't so good: the QNAP transfer reate was very low (about 400Kb/s) due (probably) to the limited CPU. After that I disabled compression at all (level 0) and I was able to speed up the transfer up to 3MB/s.
Even if the transfer rate is not so high (when I just access to the TS209 shared folders I can reach about 14Mb/s) the result is enough for my needs: documents and other important data are transferred in about 1h.
Consider that during the backup process the TS209 is almost "stuck": you cannot use the web server / interface and the access to the shared folder via SMB is quite slow.
Next step is to run backuppc at every start of the NAS.
The "chroot" Debian has two different directory in which you can put your init script:
/ext/extchrootbin
is used for scripts that has to run outside the chroot environment and
ext/bin
is used for scripts that run inside the chroot.
in the first one I just add a script to "bind mount" a share "inside" the chroot environment. Something like:
#!/bin/sh
mount --bind /share/MD0_DATA/Backup /share/MD0_DATA/etch/var/lib/backuppc/
In this way I can access to the backup folder without using the web interface
in the second folder I just add a link to start both Apache and backuppc.
ln -s /etc/init.d/Apache /ext/bin/000-Apache
ln -s /etc/init.d/backuppc /ext/bin/001-backuppc
Next step is to try to compile the backuppc and run it directly in the "real" TS209 environment to avoid to start another Apache instance but this.. well.. I will try in the next future 