What is the best way to connect to a repository on a NAS from other computers on the same network?
The obvious way is by accessing it as a filesystem through SMB or NFS, although I’m not sure this is the best way, where “best” is the good mix of performance, keeping permissions and other factors that I’m not aware of.
I was also thinking about running an instance of Kopia in server mode on the NAS and then accessing the repository through the server interface.
In my situation I don’t need to “protect” the repository from unknown users, so if the server approach only helps in that regard I say I don’t need it.
I would actually recommend SSH instead of SMB. I have tried SMB and it has caused nothing but performance and reliability headaches. SSH on the other hand has been an absolute pleasure by comparison. You are connecting over LAN anyway, so a basic SSH should suffice. You can get passwordless auth using public key crypto and Kopia has native (and high performance) support for SSH.
Server is not required in you case - the server only serves to manage permissions from a repository perspective. So if you have multiple users connecting to the same repo and you want to control who can do what, only then the server serves a purpose. Instead, just use the client to directly connect to the repository and you are done. This is the exact setup I have been using for months now and works like a charm.
Well… in case the repo resides on the NAS, I’d always go with Kopia Server, if not for security, then at least for performance reasons. Accessing the repo will be much faster, if you can cut out all the latency, that a mounted NAS volume inherently brings into the setup. SMB and NFS are notoriously slow, when dealing with file access.
Sorry to necro an old thread, just wanted to ask if anyone’s got experience using a repo from an NFS share.
@budy you mention that NFS is slow, but i’m having trouble understanding how using Kopia Server as a proxy to the storage layer is faster than mounting the remote directory via NFS.
Depending on the size or your future repo, you will accumulate a lot of files. Both, SMB and NFS are rather slow, when it comes to handling a lot of files. NFS can be tweaked, but that requires a lot of knowledge and I am pretty sure, that regular NASs won’t let have you access to that, since this is not their main purpose.
Running a kopia server with direct access to the storage will cut out the incurring latencies, which will come when kopia itself has to talk to a NAS storage. If you can install Kopia server on a storage directly, I’d always go with that.