Backups application queries

[ianp5a]

I'm trying to find a user friendly way to backup off of my main disk to my NAS on my local network. Up til now every backup application I tried could not navigate to the LAN to set a destination.
Yesterday I discovered the 'Backups' application in Settings, which does let you navigate to the NAS. Sadly, so far Backups does not want to start and has not backed anything up on schedule. And there is no manual way to start it via the System Tray icon as it is supposed to. A clue is the tooltip on the system tray icon says "Backup destination not available". Even though the NAS is available and open and active in Dolphin at the same time. Dolphin and Krusader have no problem accessing the read/writable share on the NAS. So it looks like another backup application that fails.
Does anybody have experience of the Backups program or know of any user friendly (not command line) way to copy files to a NAS as the Backups program does. (see screenshot)
I'm on Kubuntu 21.10

Thanks.
Edit: After some searching I believe the Backups application might be also called "Kup" https://invent.kde.org/system/kup

[ianp5a]

I've now found this is a bug. https://invent.kde.org/system/kup/-/issues/16
Also: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445391

[sithlord48]

The bug reports are useless w/ no info that will help any dev.

The issue is likey do to SMB not supporting the permissions that Rsync is trying to copy stuff with.

Lets talk about about your NAS setup .. How do you mount the shares ? does it require auth ? etc..

[ianp5a]

Lets talk about about your NAS setup .. How do you mount the shares ? does it require auth ? etc..

The shares are not mounted. If they were they'd appear as local folders. So I have to use the file selector in the Backups app to navigate to the local network and select a folder on a share. Once done it stores a smb path as the backup destination.
The shares were created via the WD web interface of the Western Digital NAS. They are accessible in Dolphin and also on other network devices such as Android phones and a Windows PC.

[claydoh]

Kup has: Support for local filesystem or external usb storage.
So, if it does not natively support remote storage, or kio-fuse, then it will only work when the share is mounted - such as when you open it in Dolphin or a file-picker, and it creates a temporary mount point.
You could add the share to your fstab, and then kup would work.

[sithlord48]

Well you maybe want to have them mounted for rsync. Your nas should support rsync mode see if you can enable that and use it in place of SMB

[ianp5a]

I never found any GUI way for people to mount network shares. I suspect there is an easy way. I can't imagine any technical reasons not to have one. It's easy to mount local drives via a GUI.

[sithlord48]

I don't know about that as tbh its way easier to just do it via the CLI that i never ever once looked for a gui tool...

I think you can use removable disk widget in the system tray but not sure how this works for network shares.

to add to your /etc/fstab you would add a like like this

SERVER/sharename /mnt/mountpoint cifs username=username,password=password,workgroup=workgroup,iocharset=utf8,uid=username,gid=group,users



you will need to make the /mnt/mountpoint folder for it be able to mount the share.
you can then test you have it correct with the command

sudo mount -a

[ianp5a]

Thanks, but I need to hold out for the GUI way. As I need to share this knowledge with other non-IT people. I don't want to tell them that Kubuntu fails at something very basic, yet very important for people to be able to do their backups. Also I'll certainly have to make changes some time in the future. Where I can return to a familiar place in a GUI and see what I did.