Back Up Trello to Synology NAS

I’ve been using a paper-based planner for years. From time to time, I’ve tried to convert to an electronic system found them all lacking. My most recent attempt is with Trello and it might just work.

Before fully commiting to anything in the cloud, I wanted to have a backup strategy in place. Trello will let you export your data in JSON format. All I needed to do is automate that. I found a script called trello-backup that will do the job. I set it up in my home directory according to its instructions and verified it saved my data.

Now to automate it… The Synology DS 411+II seems like a logical choice since it runs 24/7 and is itself backed up every night. This wasn’t as easy as I would have expected. Synology has their own cron and from what I Googled, it’s rather picky. They also have an interface to it in the Control Panel. This was also picky, but here’s how I got it to work:

  1. Log in to the NAS Web interface as root
  2. From the Control Panel, select Task Scheduler
  3. Create a task of type “user-defined script”
  4. Name the task “Trello Backup” and have it run as root.  You can try to run as your user name, but it won’t work.
  5. For the run command, enter “php /volume1/homes/<you>/trello-backup/trello-backup.php 2>&1 > /var/log/trello-backup.log”
  6. Select the Schedule tab and set it to run daily
  7. Upload the contents of the working trello-backup directory to a directory of the same name in your home on the NAS
  8. Make sure everything’s working by highlighting the Trello Backup task and selecting run