How can I schedule a Sync backup to run nightly?

[brlowe]

I have a 4TB My Cloud drive on my network. I have a 4TB My Book USB drive plugged into the back of the MY Cloud drive. I have created a backup job that copies a folder from the My Cloud drive to the My Book drive. This works great but now I need to set a schedule for this sync backup.

How do I do that?

Right now I have to just log in and run the job every day. I would like to have it run by itself everynight without me running it from my computer.
Any help would be great

[Bennor]

What My Cloud firmware are you running? The older first generation v4.x or the newer v2.x used on second gen My Cloud’s? If you are using the v4.x firmware you can schedule Safepoints to run at set times. If you have the second gen v2.x firmware My Cloud there is no schedule option build into the Backup feature. Stupid but that’s the deal. Feel free to voice your opinion as others have done in the following Cloud Ideas discussion.

https://community.wd.com/t/schedule-queue-usb-backups/96993

Unofficially one workaround to this lack of a scheduler in the Backup feature is to use Rsync. Use the forum search, magnifying glass icon upper right, and search for Rsync to find several past discussions on how to use Rsync to automate backing up a My Cloud.

Edit to add: And no, you cannot downgrade a second generation v2.x firmware My Cloud to run the older first gen v4.x firmware.

[brlowe]

I have firmware 2.21.126.
I did a search for Rsync but was confused a lot. No do not know unix commands very well. The sad part is I’m a software engineer and this I do not understand.
I have a folder on my NAS drive “Media”.
I have a sync backup job called MediaBU. This works great and takes about 2-5 minutes to run.
I would like to schedule this to run nightly. Using RSync how do I do this and will it use my backup job or do I need to do it all in Rsync? Will RSync remove files in the backup that have been removed from the master drive like the sync backup job does?

Thank you

[Bob_Kingsmill]

I am going through the same thing right now on this thread How can I backup my My Cloud to my My Book? - #15 by Bob_Kingsmill

I have a theory about how to make it work but I am waiting for someone to tell me if it makes sense:

@Bob_Kingsmill

• Internal Backup allows you to choose when to backup.
• If you use Internal Backup it basically copies the data onto the same drive so that you are limited to using half of the available memory for files and half for backups
• We already established that if I enable USB Content Availability the memory of the My Book is added to the My Cloud and the My Book shows up as a Share.

Could I enable USB Availability and set up Internal Backup Jobs to backup each of the other shares to the My Book share on different nights? I’m thinking that since the My Book is 3TB and the My Cloud is 2TB that should allow me to still have most of the My Cloud for data…

[jamalaya]

if you already have a utility that does a job and you want to schedule it to run at certain times then in Unix world (Linux) you will use the traditional cron utility to run your jobs at certain times. here is a link that explains what cron is and how to use it,

UNIX Basics: JOB SCHEDULING

Hope this helps.

[brlowe]

The backup job is inside the MyCloud app. Can I still schedule that backup using cron?

[jamalaya]

no, it has to be a Linux app. Thought that what you meant when you said you have a sync backup job. in this case this method won’t work.

Which app are you using and more info about the job will help,

[brlowe]

I’m just running back up right from the MyCloud interface on the drive. What ever the built in backup program is.
If someone would write out the steps to create a backup job in the Linux command line I could do that. But I do not even know how to get to the command line or create the job.
All I want to do it backup one folder (Media) from the NAS drive to the connected USB drive and schedule it to run once nightly without having to run a backup program on my computer as that is not on at night.