Hi. I am happy to be a new part of the Freenas community as of like 2 weeks ago!
BACKGROUND - INFO
To give a little background about me and my needs: I run a small office, under 20 people, and also I am the main IT guy unfortunately. We do electrical design, so our PCs normally have several files open in parallel, MS office and Autocad being the most common. File size can go up to 20-30 MB per file (or more, but that is rarely).
In addition we have some programs which have database files stored on the server (it's not running a database per-say, it's internal program database, only many small files need to be stored and shared between several users).
What we do is mount various network drives to our users and they open files directly via CIFS share. This way we avoid double versions and keep everyone up-to-date with latest files.
Seeking something simple and almost zero-maintenance, we have so far relied on Synlogy DS 412+ which has served us quite well, but recently it has become a bit too slow dealing with so many files in real-time. After research, I decided against a new top-end Synology, but rather took a spare workstation we had and tried turning it into a Freenas file server. We are talking about a HP 290 G2 MT Business PC, i5-8500 3 GHz, 8 GB RAM, gigabit LAN. Upgraded with a 1 TB NVMe for storage, SATA SSD 120GB for filesystem (had one spare), fired it up and we are basically using it for past 2 weeks. Speed is awesome, Freenas seems very low-maintenance, it has many options if we need to, it joined our domain without problems. So All is great!
QUESTION:
I want to ensure backup, redundancy, safety of files. In Synology I had a RAID5 configuration. That one is still runing and I was planing to use it for secondary backup of my main Freenas pool. But I would like some additional redundancy, and am thinking about also setting up Snapshots. I would add some Caviar Red 7200 in RAID1 as a second pool or something, or maybe some SATA SSDs? Idea is to have a backup drive where I would do hourly shadow copy (if possible and if it wouldn't kill off my performance of my NVMe main drive, seems unlikely) and then do snapshots on that volume? We really don't need hourly - it would be a big shame if we lost a day's work but not a complete disaster.
So What I want to accomplish, in order of priority:
- Ensure security/backup of data against hardware failure. We have an identical PC which will be readily available to stick hard drives in if this one fails, and simply boot up again.
- have a nightly backup at minimum (once a day)
- have an hourly backup if possible (to reduce possibly lost work)
- have a daily snapshot in some way and keep daily 1-2 weeks. I would then keep weekly snapshot for 2 months, and monthly for 1 year. Annual forever.
- have a hourly snapshot if possible. That would be kept only like 24/48 hours
- to have snapshots readable via CIFS from my windows machines as Windows Previous Versions (I hear that's possible, it would be most convenient way)
- set up some backup to a separate machine (Synology prefered)
- set up WebDav cloud backup (i have a 1TB cloud service included from my ISP which I now use via Synology, so i can set up a backup to Synology, and then to cloud from there)
What hard drives would you recommend I buy for secondary pool? Do I need Raid0 or is a single, larger hard drive enough? SSD or server-line HDD? How to accomplish all this? Am I an idiot for not setting up RAID1 on the main pool from the start?
I know it's a long post, but I assume people here have similar or parallel set-ups and shared some of my ideas and concerns at one point or another, and I REALLY will appreciate any and all help I can get!
BACKGROUND - INFO
To give a little background about me and my needs: I run a small office, under 20 people, and also I am the main IT guy unfortunately. We do electrical design, so our PCs normally have several files open in parallel, MS office and Autocad being the most common. File size can go up to 20-30 MB per file (or more, but that is rarely).
In addition we have some programs which have database files stored on the server (it's not running a database per-say, it's internal program database, only many small files need to be stored and shared between several users).
What we do is mount various network drives to our users and they open files directly via CIFS share. This way we avoid double versions and keep everyone up-to-date with latest files.
Seeking something simple and almost zero-maintenance, we have so far relied on Synlogy DS 412+ which has served us quite well, but recently it has become a bit too slow dealing with so many files in real-time. After research, I decided against a new top-end Synology, but rather took a spare workstation we had and tried turning it into a Freenas file server. We are talking about a HP 290 G2 MT Business PC, i5-8500 3 GHz, 8 GB RAM, gigabit LAN. Upgraded with a 1 TB NVMe for storage, SATA SSD 120GB for filesystem (had one spare), fired it up and we are basically using it for past 2 weeks. Speed is awesome, Freenas seems very low-maintenance, it has many options if we need to, it joined our domain without problems. So All is great!
QUESTION:
I want to ensure backup, redundancy, safety of files. In Synology I had a RAID5 configuration. That one is still runing and I was planing to use it for secondary backup of my main Freenas pool. But I would like some additional redundancy, and am thinking about also setting up Snapshots. I would add some Caviar Red 7200 in RAID1 as a second pool or something, or maybe some SATA SSDs? Idea is to have a backup drive where I would do hourly shadow copy (if possible and if it wouldn't kill off my performance of my NVMe main drive, seems unlikely) and then do snapshots on that volume? We really don't need hourly - it would be a big shame if we lost a day's work but not a complete disaster.
So What I want to accomplish, in order of priority:
- Ensure security/backup of data against hardware failure. We have an identical PC which will be readily available to stick hard drives in if this one fails, and simply boot up again.
- have a nightly backup at minimum (once a day)
- have an hourly backup if possible (to reduce possibly lost work)
- have a daily snapshot in some way and keep daily 1-2 weeks. I would then keep weekly snapshot for 2 months, and monthly for 1 year. Annual forever.
- have a hourly snapshot if possible. That would be kept only like 24/48 hours
- to have snapshots readable via CIFS from my windows machines as Windows Previous Versions (I hear that's possible, it would be most convenient way)
- set up some backup to a separate machine (Synology prefered)
- set up WebDav cloud backup (i have a 1TB cloud service included from my ISP which I now use via Synology, so i can set up a backup to Synology, and then to cloud from there)
What hard drives would you recommend I buy for secondary pool? Do I need Raid0 or is a single, larger hard drive enough? SSD or server-line HDD? How to accomplish all this? Am I an idiot for not setting up RAID1 on the main pool from the start?
I know it's a long post, but I assume people here have similar or parallel set-ups and shared some of my ideas and concerns at one point or another, and I REALLY will appreciate any and all help I can get!