UI7 Disable Backups

Community Playground General Discussions
#1

Hello,

I did some searching and can not find an answer. I am looking to install a vera in my vacation property. It will be running off a 3G connection with very low data caps so I want to reduce the data Vera will be using to an absolute minimum.

When looking at my Vera at my primary residence it appears it does a backup daily and from my understanding stores it on an external server. Is there a way to disable this in UI7? It appears there used to be a check box but I don’t see it in UI7.

#2

Did you ever find out how to disable backups on UI7? It was easy in UI5, just not sure where to find it in UI7

#3

Under Settings > Logs there’s an “Archive old logs on MiOS” checkbox that you can turn off. This stops the upload of log files to the servers after the logs are rotated. The state of this setting is also visible as the “ArchiveLogsOnServer” value in /etc/cmh/cmh.conf. The check to see if logs should be rotated happens hourly, so this could potentially generate a log of traffic if your logs frequently meet the criteria for rotation.

As for backups, I’m looking at the scripts in the os, and I’m not yet seeing evidence that UI7 uploads backups by itself to the servers. On my system, I only see evidence of backups to the server in the context of firmware upgrades (that is, it backs up to the server before applying the upgrade). I don’t see evidence of regular (e.g. daily) automatic backups occurring, with or without a server push; the only other traces are from manual backups I’ve launched from the UI, and those didn’t force an upload to the server. It may be I just haven’t found it yet, but it’s looking so far like UI7 pushes a lot less data than UI5 did, which I think is good–I can’t imagine why they’d expend the resources getting daily backups from every unit sold that has Internet access. Bandwidth costs money for them, too.

#4

If you login to Vera first you will see that the DO a nightly backup. They keep a little over 2 weeks of backups.
This reduces the cost of their SUPPORT. Often a Restore from a previously working state is all that is needed to recover your Vera.

#5

Richard,

Do you have any idea how that is launched? I can see that /usr/bin/backup-store.sh run with “S” as the sole command line argument will run a backup and push it to the server, but when I looked at the log file it writes (/tmp/log.upgrade) it appears that the only entries were for my own invocations of that script from the login shell, so as of then, I wasn’t able to see any evidence of any prior run, let alone a daily one.

#6

if you don’t find a programmatic solution.
you could block the servers with a router.(all but the one needed for remote access)
would need some trial and error though to make sure you have it dial in.

#7

That may work. The servers are defined in /etc/cmh/servers.conf, and the two specific servers that the backup script uses are under the names “Server_Storage” and “Server_Storage_Alt”.

In my config, these point to vera-us-oem-storage11.mios.com and vera-us-oem-storage12.mios.com. Those seem likely chosen from a larger set of servers, so each Vera’s config may be different. It’s also reasonable to assume that they could change with firmware updates. The REST API that’s used to upload files also defines a GetServers request, so it’s quite possible the Vera would periodically update its list of servers and they could change (apparently) randomly with that.

The other caveat here is that a MiOS server may used for multiple purposes. That is, vera-us-oem-storage11 could also resolve to the same IP address as vera-us-oem-firmware11, because it’s used to handle both storage of files and firmware update checks. If your firewall rule is blocking by IP address, you will have the effect of preventing backup uploads and preventing firmware update checks. Things like that may be a trade-off that OP is willing to accept to save himself from a giant bill from his cellular data carrier.

If you happen to have a deep inspection firewall, you could also specifically look for outbound requests containing “storage/storage/store” and drop them.

Finally, one could modify the backup script itself to simply not do the upload. This would, of course, likely void the product warranty and get you denied for support in future (I seem to recall warnings about this), although the risk to the function of the OS is quite slight. It’s easy to see in the script where and how this would be done, but it takes a little trickery because the file is installed on a read-only filesystem, so you’d need to momentarily get around that to make the script change.

#8

if you get / have said router,
you could just set up vpn and block internet access to the device.
then vpn to control it.
that of course has it’s pro’s and cons as well

#9

Just confirmed that if you modify /etc/cmh/servers.conf, changing the server names on the lines “Storage_Server” and “Storage_Server_Alt” to 127.0.01, it doesn’t stop MiOS from attempting the backup, but prevents it from uploading it. Again, MCV may frown on that. It would certainly make you responsible for maintaining your own backups manually, and using them to do any necessary recovery.