Cloud based backup with ZFS send and receive?

[Henning Kessler]

Hi there,

just stumbled over this cloud based backup provider which claims this:

The obvious next step is to offer ZFS send and receive, over SSH, to our platform. We are happy to announce this new feature.

http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html

has someone already gave this a try?

Regards

Henning

 

[Ericloewe]

A few users have tried it. It seems to work well, no reports of nasty surprises.

They're also used to working with FreeNAS, so setup should be easy.

 

[adrianwi]

Not the cheapest though! I've got 3.5TB backed up with CrashPlan (which once configured in a Linux VM has been working like a dream) which costs $60 a year. This is $60 a MONTH PER TB :o

 

[Henning Kessler]

Thanks for your replies. And yes the price is definitely not best in the market but having the power and efficiency of ZFS send and receive sounds so nice...

 

[SweetAndLow]

Thanks for your replies. And yes the price is definitely not best in the market :) but having the power and efficiency of ZFS send and receive sounds so nice...

Your data probably isn't encrypted which is a deal breaker for most people and it should be for you also.

 

[KevDog]

Sorry for the late response to this thread, however a possible workaround?? rsync.net is very expensive however they also have a no-frills borg backup solution which is like 20% of the cost. They don't however provide any assistance for this problem. Although this solution would unfortunately mean that you would have to use a third party program -- in this instance borg backup -- it would be similar to using crashplan. Borg however allows for encrypted backups and I'm well aware rsync.net is used to people using this as a backup program.

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

Hi everyone!

Reviving a bit of an old thread, but I've been looking for ZFS-based cloud backup solutions for the last several days, and have unfortunately come up a bit empty-handed.

I personally know rsync.net, I use it at work all the time to backup daily & nightly snapshots for at least three ZFS filesystems (plain ol' simple "zfs send | ssh host 'zfs receive'), retaining them for at least a month, and it's working pretty well, specially with the very nice networking bandwidth that they have (initial transfer of close to 1TB took around 23 hours), and for not getting charged anything extra for data extraction. The caveat of your data at rest (in a live & mounted filesystem, a requirement for incremental sends) not being encrypted is true, though, and it's a bit of a problem because their FreeBSD instances are by default configured with kern.securelevel at 3, so you generally need to ask them to step in for you if you need non-trivial system maintenance, and that can be a problem for some. Though you can choose to revoke their access to the VM (and maybe set kern.securelevel to -1 to do all the maintenance yourself, if they allow that), bottom line is that the default setup requires you to make the explicit decision of trusting them.

But at around $100/month for a 2TB pool, rsync.net is a bit of a hefty choice for a personal budget, in my opinion. Anyone know of an equivalent cloud backup solution that might be a little bit cheaper? Or are those the prices I should expect for this kind of service? There's an Australia company offering pretty much the same package as rsync.net, at apparently very similar price-points, so I'm not too hopeful so far...

 

[Sakuru]

It's not ZFS based, but I've been thinking about trying Duplicacy with Backblaze B2.

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

I'm currently attempting a 4GB t2.medium AWS instance booted with FreeBSD 11.1 and 1024GB of EBS, transferring my snapshots to it through the FreeNAS GUI. It's been working fairly nice so far, though the $60/month expense that I'm expecting certainly doesn't put it on the cheap side end of the cloud backup options spectrum.

I've been searching and searching and I find it difficult to improve much, if at all, on the price of this kind of solution. Maybe I'll be able to receive my snapshots with a 2GB AWS instance, and shave off a couple of bucks there, but the problem remains that the largest piece of the price pie is the block storage for the remote pool.

If anyone has ideas, please keep 'em coming!

 

[SweetAndLow]

I'm currently attempting a 4GB t2.medium AWS instance booted with FreeBSD 11.1 and 1024GB of EBS, transferring my snapshots to it through the FreeNAS GUI. It's been working fairly nice so far, though the $60/month expense that I'm expecting certainly doesn't put it on the cheap side end of the cloud backup options spectrum.

I've been searching and searching and I find it difficult to improve much, if at all, on the price of this kind of solution. Maybe I'll be able to receive my snapshots with a 2GB AWS instance, and shave off a couple of bucks there, but the problem remains that the largest piece of the price pie is the block storage for the remote pool.

If anyone has ideas, please keep 'em coming!

Use just a freebsd install in aws. You can get away with a much smaller system, 2GB would probably be ok then.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

Use just a freebsd install in aws. You can get away with a much smaller system, 2GB would probably be ok then.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Don't follow your comment. That's what I said, I'm using a 4GB t2.medium AWS instance, and that I could probably use a smaller 2GB VM and still have a performant 'zfs receive' remote backup solution... but that that's not going to improve the budget very much, because at best that'll only shave off a few bucks from it. The vas majority of the budget will still go towards the block storage drive that you have to provision to host your snapshots (of your already lz4-compressed filesystems).

 

[SweetAndLow]

Don't follow your comment. That's what I said, I'm using a 4GB t2.medium AWS instance, and that I could probably use a smaller 2GB VM and still have a performant 'zfs receive' remote backup solution... but that that's not going to improve the budget very much, because at best that'll only shave off a few bucks from it. The vas majority of the budget will still go towards the block storage drive that you have to provision to host your snapshots (of your already lz4-compressed filesystems).

Woops, I read it as freenas but you clearly wrote freebsd. Forget my comment.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Stux]

Put a small FreeBSD server at mom's house...

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

Not only does Mom have an, at best, 10Mbps connection, but she also will not know what to do if one of the drives in the pool configuration necessary to provide enough redundancy for me to sleep easy knowing my backups are safe dies.

Aint that why we pay for cloud solutions in the first place, the guarantees that they provide?

 

[patrick sullivan]

Not the cheapest though! I've got 3.5TB backed up with CrashPlan (which once configured in a Linux VM has been working like a dream) which costs $60 a year. This is $60 a MONTH PER TB

Do you use the FreeNAS Crashplan plugin as well? They view your NAS as "1 computer"?

 

[adrianwi]

Do you use the FreeNAS Crashplan plugin as well? They view your NAS as "1 computer"?

I don't use the Crashplan plugin as it never worked for more than a few months without issues. I'm using a VirtualBox jail running CentOS (although you'll be better trying to run a VM another way with more up to date versions of FreeNAS) and run Crashplan in that.

Not a single issue since adopting this approach, and with a weekly report to tell me everything is backed up, I rarely open the VM. I now have 4.1TB backed up :D

 

[patrick sullivan]

I don't use the Crashplan plugin as it never worked for more than a few months without issues. I'm using a VirtualBox jail running CentOS (although you'll be better trying to run a VM another way with more up to date versions of FreeNAS) and run Crashplan in that.

Not a single issue since adopting this approach, and with a weekly report to tell me everything is backed up, I rarely open the VM. I now have 4.1TB backed up :D

Interesting. Well, I have a separate windows based PC running along side my NAS (similar to your VM I suppose). Does the Crashplan service allow for network drives to be included in the "1 computer" for $60/year?

I remember trying to use Amazon's unlimited data setup, and it was a joke for large files (timed out, froze up, etc)

 

[adrianwi]

All of the files I'm backing up are stored on my FreeNAS machine, so I just have NFS shares to the datasets inside the VM. It's mainly the stuff I couldn't replace if my local machine was stolen or the house burnt down, so pictures, music, documents and some configuration stuff to get me back up and running. I do have a few VM images though, which are 20+ GB, and appeared to backup OK. I've not actually needed to restore anything, which I really should test, as I also have a local backup to fall back on. Crashplan is really just for the worst case scenario, which I hope won't ever happen!

 

[SweetAndLow]

I don't use the Crashplan plugin as it never worked for more than a few months without issues. I'm using a VirtualBox jail running CentOS (although you'll be better trying to run a VM another way with more up to date versions of FreeNAS) and run Crashplan in that.

Not a single issue since adopting this approach, and with a weekly report to tell me everything is backed up, I rarely open the VM. I now have 4.1TB backed up :D

I do the exact same thing.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Stux]

Not only does Mom have an, at best, 10Mbps connection, but she also will not know what to do if one of the drives in the pool configuration necessary to provide enough redundancy for me to sleep easy knowing my backups are safe dies.

Aint that why we pay for cloud solutions in the first place, the guarantees that they provide?

Depends what your average change stream is. I upload to my offsite (not quite moms) at 2.5mbps, after an initial local sync, it's not so bad.

I would expect if a drive failed mom could expect a visit from son ;)

They like that sort of thing.

Guess it depends how close you are.