Advice on Scheduling Backups

[TravisT]

So I have FN running on my new hardware pretty well now. Still have a couple tweaks to make, but it's time to start a good backup routine.

I have several USB drives that I'd like to rotate each month so I have 2-3 different snapshots of data in the event of a loss. The data consists of files, pictures and videos, but also contains some iSCSI device targets for my home ESXi server that runs about 5 servers. I would like to incorporate them into the backup at some point, but haven't researched that too much yet.

I was doing a clunky backup solution where I plugged my USB drives into a windows computer and ran a scheduled rsync each month. This was beneficial because if the server crashed, I could easily plug the USB into my windows box and read the data. I'd like to explore a solution that I could plug the USB drive directly into the FN box and copy the files over, but would like to be able to read them easily in a windows box. I know that FN can read NTFS partitions - is this a viable solution?

I searched and couldn't find anything, but if I missed it or anyone has comments on how to best back this data up, I'd like the input.

 

[cyberjock]

Thoughts from what I read in no particular order.

1. USB drives aren'tisn't recommended for long term use in FreeNAS.(OS drive is ok)
2. Trying to have 2-3 different USBs isn't an idea I'd ever recommend. If one USB acts weird it will make troubleshooting alot harder if the target OS keeps changing. Keep 1 USB stick in the machine and make regular backups of the config file.(RTM to see how to do this easily) Recovery only requires you to install FreeNAS to a new USB stick and import the config file you backed up. Downtime = 15 minutes
3. NTFS is very unreliable in FreeBSD. It can range from working fine to losing files suddenly and depends on alot of factors. If you want it to be "ready to work" in Windows, then it should just be kept connected to windows. I would recommend you abandon the idea of having the drives work in Windows if you plan to use FreeNAS.
4. For backups, if you read up on ZFS snapshots and ZFS replication you'll see that you can do amazing things with backups using those. Those are commonly used as enterprise class backups.

 

[ProtoSD]

+1

FreeNAS doesn't do an exceptional job with any of the non-native filesystems, even ext2 isn't reliable.

The other problem with swapping USB drives is that when you detach them FreeNAS doesn't forget them, and it gets them mixed up causing a handful of problems.

Probably the best way to use USB drives in FreeNAS is manually mounting them from the command line, but then you're back the the non-native filesystems issue.

Probably when FreeNAS gets to 9.x releases, some of the support for non-native filesystem *might* improve, but probably not NTFS.

It would be nice to at least have ext2,3,4 work reliably, but it really depends on how well FreeBSD supports it.

 

[TravisT]

I'll have to check more into the snapshot process - I understand the concept, but don't have a good grasp on the best way to implement in my situation. I'm not very storage-savvy.

If backing up to USB isn't the best option (regardless of file system), what are some good alternatives in a home environment short of building a second server to mirror my data?

It also seems that you're talking about backing up the FreeNAS OS itself on a USB drive. This isn't my intent, I'm talking about backing up my data stored on my ZFS file systems within FreeNAS. It currently consists of 10TB of RAW storage. 4TB of that is a RAIDz 10 (stripped/mirrored) for my VM iSCSI LUNs and the rest is a 3 disk RAIDz volume for my other storage.