Backup Solution

[thatflashcat]

I've got a FreeNAS box with 6 * 4 TB drives in RAID z2 that has been running well for the past year and a half, and is a huge improvement compared what I had before (single drives with no backups or redundancy whatsoever). I've been planning to add backups for a while now. Ideally I would use an encrypted backup with backblaze but my upload speed is a horrid 6 Mbps, far too slow to upload everything at once. I currently have around 1.2 TB of data (my 14 TB of storage is a bit overkill for now :P). My best alternative would be to use local backups on another local drive and then take it off-site. What is the best way of accomplishing this? r-clone? Are USB drives feasible or is my best bet to use a standard 3.5 drive?

 

[garm]

How to: Backup to local disks

How to: Backups to local disks Overview: This subject comes up often enough that I thought I would start a post of how I do it. Specifically I back up my TrueNAS to a hot-inserted, locally attached disk, then when done, hot-remove and take...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[jlpellet]

I do this via a local Windows machine with access to the FreeNAS share & a USB 3 HD (4~5 TB under $100), with teracopy. Slower than a directly attached drive & more reliable than FreeNAS USB. Also, the Windows box is on my desk so no messing around in the server room. YMMV but works for me (& I rotate a backup offsite monthly).

 

[norbert.hanke]

I replicate with zfs send <manyparameters> | ssh <backupserver> zfs receive <someparameters> .
Using daily zfs snapshots I only transfer the deltas since the last backup and have an exact replica of the primary system's storage.
You can do the same with a plugin USB drive, of course.

For full docs of all zfs commands see https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi...FreeBSD+11.3-RELEASE&arch=default&format=html

With regards to redundancy and RAID I do it the opposite way to your setup: my primary server has only a 4TB SSD, and the backup system has 6*4TB RAIDZ2.
Primary is based on a passive cooled Mitac PD10AI-N4200 Atom board running 7x24, drawing very little power. Backup server is a conventional workstation-class PC with mechanical discs, switched on for maybe 20 minutes during the night: 15 minutes to warm up the disks and 5 minutes to store the incremental backup.

 

[thatflashcat]

I wish I had a second box but replicating between freenas systems isn't feasible right now, so I'll either need to do it directly to drives within the nas or through the share.