Cloud based backup with ZFS send and receive?

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

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.

Yeah, that's the thing, I'm kinda far away (read, different countries). But on a similar idea, if 1TB of EBS on AWS is going to cost me around $60/month, I'm definitely going to have to look for a different solution if my storage needs keep growing. I wonder what building a second NAS and colocating it somewhere might cost... sure, there's the initial high cost of building the machine with some amount of storage in the first place, but then you're pretty much guaranteed a fixed monthly cost for the colocation service, without increases as your remote pool grows.

Anyone got any comments on that alternative?

 

[patrick sullivan]

If encryption isn't important (movies, music, etc), but you are dealing with a large pool size of around 19 Tb, would one of the online FTP providers be affordable? I just installed crashplan and it's doing it's thing on a 250 Gb file, but it will take weeks to complete. Ugh! At least it isn't crashing/freezing like Amazon's service did....

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

If encryption isn't important (movies, music, etc), but you are dealing with a large pool size of around 19 Tb, would one of the online FTP providers be affordable? I just installed crashplan and it's doing it's thing on a 250 Gb file, but it will take weeks to complete. Ugh! At least it isn't crashing/freezing like Amazon's service did....

I'm assuming you've seen the news about CrashPlan...?

My search for a ZFS-based backup solution hasn't continued full-steam, but when I was still at I still hadn't found a suitable cheaper replacement for rsync.net.

My AWS setup, a 4GB FreeBSD 11.1 instance with 1TB of cold block storage, continues to happily receive my snapshots, and having full shell access allows me to script their expiry there at different intervals from my local ones, which I love! But at an estimate of ~ $55/month for this solution, I don't expect I'll be able to keep it alive going forward if my cloud backup needs escalate beyond 1TB.

If I happen to come across something better I'll let you know here.

 

[patrick sullivan]

I'm assuming you've seen the news about CrashPlan...?

My search for a ZFS-based backup solution hasn't continued full-steam, but when I was still at I still hadn't found a suitable cheaper replacement for rsync.net.

My AWS setup, a 4GB FreeBSD 11.1 instance with 1TB of cold block storage, continues to happily receive my snapshots, and having full shell access allows me to script their expiry there at different intervals from my local ones, which I love! But at an estimate of ~ $55/month for this solution, I don't expect I'll be able to keep it alive going forward if my cloud backup needs escalate beyond 1TB.

If I happen to come across something better I'll let you know here.

Sorry, been out of town. Yes, I received the notification. Surprised there aren't more people in this same situation/discussing various options.....

 

[SimonFN]

Sorry, been out of town. Yes, I received the notification. Surprised there aren't more people in this same situation/discussing various options.....

I just read this article: https://toomanyadapters.com/best-cloud-backup-service/ it's biased towards travelers, but discusses a number of alternatives.

 

[patrick sullivan]

I just read this article: https://toomanyadapters.com/best-cloud-backup-service/ it's biased towards travelers, but discusses a number of alternatives.

I'll give Backblaze a shot and post back. Sounds like you and I have different needs, but a cloud is a cloud with different features I guess. Thanks for the link....

Cheers!

 

[patrick sullivan]

Backblaze does not allow network drives or mapped drives to be included in their service. Not an option for FreeNAS users.....At least not at my level of knowledge!

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

From what I understand, there's no Backblaze client for FreeNAS, so that pretty much negates my entire backup strategy:

1) Two Macs TimeMachine'ing to my NAS.
2) Periodic hourly & nightly snapshots of my NAS shares, with their local retention policy.
3) Replicating those snapshots to my remote pool.
4) Keeping a separate and longer snapshot retention policy on that pool.

For 3) & 4) you most definitely need full shell access to the remote server; even a reduced shell might be able to make 3) work, but I haven't found anything like that other than rsync.net or a hand-crafted solution like mine.

And if I install Backblaze on my Macs, then my whole strategy is negated from the start (and kiss snapshotting & rollback capabilities goodbye!).

 

[rsync]

I am reviving this very old thread for two reasons ...

First, to make us (rsync.net) available to discuss any aspect of our ZFS send/recv capable accounts.

Second to (happily) report that our pricing for "zfs send to the cloud" has been lowered dramatically, which you can see on info page:

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

As was mentioned earlier in the thread, we do indeed have a lot of experience with FreeNAS devices and integrating them.

AMA ...

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

I am reviving this very old thread for two reasons ...

First, to make us (rsync.net) available to discuss any aspect of our ZFS send/recv capable accounts.

Second to (happily) report that our pricing for "zfs send to the cloud" has been lowered dramatically, which you can see on info page:

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

As was mentioned earlier in the thread, we do indeed have a lot of experience with FreeNAS devices and integrating them.

AMA ...

That is great news, thanks for the announcement! At $0.03/GB, with a 1TB minimum for ZFS send/receive, it works out to just north of $30/month for that 1TB, if I'm not mistaken. I'd gotten my AWS solution to roughly that figure by trimming down the VM size to just 1 CPU / 1GB RAM (to the point that I was pretty much just paying for the EBS volume), which made it barely usable with ZFS. E.g. whenever my Mac's Time Machine decided to invalidate all my FreeNAS-hosted backups and create a giant new one, the resulting ZFS snapshot would be so large that transferring it over to my remote pool would invariably fail until I created at least a 4 GB AWS instance and migrated the pool over to it for the duration of the receive & apply of the incremental snapshot. What I like a lot about rsync.net, and this is something I can vouch for given my daily usage of their service at work, is that they'll happily analyze your needs and bump your VM resources at no extra cost if necessary (RAM, storage you pay for of course).

All that being said, $30/month is still outside my budget for personal backups, unfortunately :( I had to cancel my AWS solution and go with Wasabi, which costs me $5/month per TB, plus deleted data retention fees. I sorely miss remote snapshots, though, so here's hoping either my budget improves or cost of storage keeps coming down.

Kudos!

 

[rsync]

That is great news, thanks for the announcement! At $0.03/GB, with a 1TB minimum for ZFS send/receive, it works out to just north of $30/month for that 1TB, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, that is correct - although, as your quantity grows the price continues to drop. At the 100+ TB range, the price is all the way down to $10/month per terabyte:

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