Installing OMV 4 (Open Media Vault) to Raspberry Pi 3+

Setting up Raspberry Pi

Download the OMV image (yes, the binaries are hosted at sourceforge still) and burn it to an SD card using Etcher.

Default loing/password is (IIRC): admin/openmediavault. I highly recommend setting up a preferred fixed IP address for you Pi on the router.

Using all the space on the system SD card

I used a 64GB card, but OMV only needs a gig or so. Reboot once, the partition for OMV will be be auto-resized. A third partition on the SD card will be created, but without a filesystem, check it out with lsblk command. Remember the name of the partition.

To add a filesystem to this partition use :

mkfs.ext4 -L <your-label> /dev/<the-partition-name>

You can now go to the Web Console -> Storage -> File Systems, locate the new partition and Mount it. It can now be used to store the data.

Setting up an HDD

I have a 1TB 2.5" HDD (HGST Travelstar 7K1000, Amazon link) in a simple USB 3 enclosure. The Pi struggled to power the HDD though, so I bought an powered USB hub (Anker 4-port powered USB hub, Amazon link). Haven’t tried it yet, but it’s quite possible you can power up to 4 HDDs this way and use them all with a single Pi.

Just plug the HDD in the hub, the hub into wall power and the Pi - you’re ready to go. Reboot the Pi. Go to the web admin console. Storage -> Disks, check that you see the new HDD there, probably as /dev/sda1.Storage -> File Systems -> +Create (there’s a button in the top row), create a new ext4 filesystem on the HDD.

Creating a shared folder available from your local network

To enable file sharing using this HDD check that Services -> SMB/CIFS is enabled. Access Right Management -> Shared Folders -> +Add and add a folder on the hard drive. You might also need to go to Access Right Management -> User and add a new user, click Privileges and grant the new user access to the shared folder.

On Windows you can now open Explorer and Map network drive. Put in an address like \\192.168.1.176\my-share. If all was right, it should ask you for login/password. Check the box log in using different credentials and supply the username and password for the user that you’ve just created through OMV admin web page.

Setting up backup of your cloud-based storage to the local HDD connected to Pi

Log in to RPi from ssh. Install RClone (https://rclone.org). Worked fine from the script installation for me. Run rclone configure to set up Google Drive integration. When asked to do “interactive” setup, say No. Then you can just copy the given link and follow it on another computer with an actual browser. Lynx won’t do, as the Google authentication page needs javascript.

Give it a go while ssh’ed into the Pi. When everything works, you can go to the OMV admin panel System -> Scheduled Jobs, which is basically a UI for adding cron jobs, and add your rclone sync or rclone copy command to run, e.g. every night at 3AM.