Hi folks, I had a jolt of reality this past summer even after building what I thought was a great FreeNAS build:
Never having dealt with a house fire before: they suck. On the plus side my family and I were all OK, and the fire department even managed to save most of the structure, so among other things my office and FreeNAS box didn't burn! But with the amount of soot that settled throughout the house (and that when exposed to copper traces etc. causes corrosion,) my current box is likely on an accelerated/borrowed-time schedule for some level of critical failure, and crucially, I don't have another copy of this data anywhere (family photos, movies, music, documents, etc.) If the entire house had burned, I would have irrecoverably lost a lot of data.
My current server is on 11.2-U7, and is a 2x Xeon retired-DC CPU/mobo/RAM box in a tall Phanteks tower case running FreeNAS off of 2x mirrored 16GB Sandisk USB drives, and a RAIDZ2 pool running across 6x6TB HGST drives that are coming up on being 3 years old. 64GB ECC registered RAM. According to the console I have 17.37 TiB free. This box is running a number of jails including Plex, Unifi's controller, a Minecraft server for my kids, a NVR package, a home automation package, and a few other things. Knowing I wanted this box to be multi-purpose was why I went relatively heavy on CPU/RAM for the build initially. With all that said most of the time the box is more or less idling.
I have the opportunity both to demote this box to being a secondary/replication machine, and putting it off-site at a family member's house. I have it in my head that I'll build a new machine, clone the pool either via replication or rsync or another similar process to the new machine, and then move this box off-site so that in the event of another true disaster, I'll have a replicated dataset.
A few questions finally: costs notwithstanding, am I making a mistake to do things this way versus paying a cloud service (or other options?) to replicate my data out to the cloud? I feel like I'm potentially out of the loop on best practices and would really appreciate some feedback here.
If building another server and setting up replication/duplication is a good choice - what would you build to replace this? I haven't actively spec'd hardware in ~3 years and would love the community's thoughts on what would be a responsible upgrade from my existing setup. Thank you all in advance!
Never having dealt with a house fire before: they suck. On the plus side my family and I were all OK, and the fire department even managed to save most of the structure, so among other things my office and FreeNAS box didn't burn! But with the amount of soot that settled throughout the house (and that when exposed to copper traces etc. causes corrosion,) my current box is likely on an accelerated/borrowed-time schedule for some level of critical failure, and crucially, I don't have another copy of this data anywhere (family photos, movies, music, documents, etc.) If the entire house had burned, I would have irrecoverably lost a lot of data.
My current server is on 11.2-U7, and is a 2x Xeon retired-DC CPU/mobo/RAM box in a tall Phanteks tower case running FreeNAS off of 2x mirrored 16GB Sandisk USB drives, and a RAIDZ2 pool running across 6x6TB HGST drives that are coming up on being 3 years old. 64GB ECC registered RAM. According to the console I have 17.37 TiB free. This box is running a number of jails including Plex, Unifi's controller, a Minecraft server for my kids, a NVR package, a home automation package, and a few other things. Knowing I wanted this box to be multi-purpose was why I went relatively heavy on CPU/RAM for the build initially. With all that said most of the time the box is more or less idling.
I have the opportunity both to demote this box to being a secondary/replication machine, and putting it off-site at a family member's house. I have it in my head that I'll build a new machine, clone the pool either via replication or rsync or another similar process to the new machine, and then move this box off-site so that in the event of another true disaster, I'll have a replicated dataset.
A few questions finally: costs notwithstanding, am I making a mistake to do things this way versus paying a cloud service (or other options?) to replicate my data out to the cloud? I feel like I'm potentially out of the loop on best practices and would really appreciate some feedback here.
If building another server and setting up replication/duplication is a good choice - what would you build to replace this? I haven't actively spec'd hardware in ~3 years and would love the community's thoughts on what would be a responsible upgrade from my existing setup. Thank you all in advance!
