I’m looking for a way in Plasma to backup and sync my data from PC to a LAN Samba share on my NAS, using a GUI program.
The many sync apps (Grsync, Unison, Lucky, RealTime, Kup etc.) I’ve tried over many years, don’t let me set a remote/samba target. Most navigate locally only. I would mount the share, but nobody I’ve found knows of a GUI way to permanently mount it.
Everything else I need on Plasma has a GUI solution. Just a sync fails. I’d be grateful to hear of a GUI solution
try Smb4K
Thanks. I already tried Smb4K. It finds the LAN shares and mounts them. But they are only mounted when Smb4K is running. I need them permanently mounted.
@ian @leopold
I believe you can add a mount in fstab with the nofail flag, so the pc still boots even if the share is not accessible
//192.168.0.5/storage /mnt/data cifs guest,uid=myuser,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,noperm,nofail 0 0
Thanks. I’m sure that is technically possible. However I’m looking for an easy GUI way to do this for non IT specialists. Plasma fails badly here. Unless I’m missing a trick…
You should be able to access SMB shares in Dolphin by typing smb://[ip address] in the location bar. If needed you can also set default username and password in System Settings->Network->Settings->Windows Shares.
Also, you can make Smb4K start automatically with Plasma by adding it in System Settings -> Workspace -> Startup and Shutdown -> Autostart.
I’ve never really used SMB, so maybe there are better solutions.
Can you install Syncthing on your NAS? I’ve been using it with my Synology NAS to sync my music from my PC.
I set my PC to be read only for the share, so that nothing else on my network can accidentally overwrite anything.
Thanks but no. It’s an off the shelf NAS disk (WD My-Cloud 4TB) with setup access via a web page. Technically it might be possible, requiring an IT hack. But I’m looking for a user-centric way.
Try Duplicati. I’m not sure if it supports smb but its worth a try.
Duplicati Thanks. I just tried it. It doesn’t list Samba under storage type. I tried it anyway and never managed to get it to work. It’s really designed for cloud services. It might be possible to make it work if I knew networking trickery. But I can’t do it.
Search “duplicati corruption”. You’ll find lots of stories of people finding out their backup repos are all corrupt.
Problem: I want to sync data from a Linux PC to a NAS Samba share. You do impose a constraint that a GUI should be available. I’ll bear that in mind.
If you can access it via scp (which is very likely, but you don’t mention the NAS model) then use rsync or similar - multiple GUIs are available and it sounds like you’ve found some already
It’s a Samba share, mount it and then sync data. GUIs are available for the sync bit. Depending on your distro a GUI may be available for the mounting thing. If you specify a mount in /etc/fstab then it is a permanent mount.
I suggest you break the problem down into two bits and solve those independently. The first one is data access ie via Samba and the second is the sync bit.
The shares are on a WD-MyCloud 4Tb off the shelf NAS. With setup page via a browser.
I’ve never found a GUI way to permanently mount a share. I hope someone develops one.
RcloneBrowser doesn’t achieve any more than Dolphin and is not designed for normal users.
I’ll be trying smb4k again. But it has not been reliable in past attempts.
Backup needs to be something straight forward for non IT users. There are real benefits to all, if more people use Linux and increase the market share. More drivers and applications for example. I find it strange that this is missing from Plasma.
