Backup solution?

[CLSegraves]

I have been using FreeNas for about 5 years now in my home. My NAS consists of:

- Asus P5K-delux M/B
- Intel Core2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86GHz (FSB set 400 to give the system a little more "zip")
- 4, 1.5TB Seagate drives setup in a ZFS RAID 0+1

This has been running for going on 3 years now (expanded storage from 1TB to 3TB) and has worked flawlessly. Just this week (2 days ago), I upgraded the FreeNAS OS from 7 to 9.1 (I literally had not touched this NAS in the past 1-2 years....it's on a UPS in a 'network closet'). I see that this new interface allows an option for making ZFS Incremental Snapshots and I'd like to start doing this. My issue is, where to a backup to? I guess I would have to build a second NAS? If so, what are the minimum requirements for this "backup NAS" if all it will ever do is house the snapshots? Is there a way to backup to something like Google cloud?

I tried searching but couldn't find a clear answer.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[dlavigne]

It has to be something running the same ZFS version (run zpool get version volumename to get the version number) as well as rsync and SSH. The replication chapter of the Guide shows how to set this up for another freenas system as that is the easiest (as rsync and ssh are already installed and it is easy to upgrade pool to same version). Using something else means you have to verify that pool is the same version and possibly install rsync then configure and ssh.