Backup to USB-HDD

[halloween]

Hi, i´m new to FreeNAS. This is my first NAS, i formerly only used external USB-Drives.

So now i´ve installed an ESXi-Server (Dell T20 with Xeon). Virtual machines are FreeNAS, Win10 and some small linux VMs.

Now i want to make a backup of my data on FreeNAS to an external USB-HDD. But i want to use this drive with a Windows-Computer for other things too. Maybe copy some large files on it to take it with me to work for example.

I´ve learnt, that FreeNAS only uses ZFS, so i can´t use NTFS anymore? Is there a way to use my external hdd with FreeNAS and Win10?


If i can´t do that, would this be a good idea:

Use the Win10 virtual machine to make a backup of the data on my FreeNAS virtual machine to a NTFS formated external drive? Or make a network share for the external drive connected to the Win10-Machine and make my backup directly from FreeNAs to the network share?


If this helps in any way:
On my Win10-VM i´ve already installed Veeam Backup to make backups of my virtual machines. But i don´t want to make backup of whole freenas, i only want to backup one volume. The other volume is only tv recordings - there i don´t need any raid or backup. Nothing important.

 

[joeschmuck]

I´ve learnt, that FreeNAS only uses ZFS, so i can´t use NTFS anymore?

Sure you can, have you read the user guide at all? It is a great place to start, I think that information is still in there. If not, a Google search should provide the answer.

You could also just create a CIFS share and on your Windoze computer connect the USB hard drive and copy the files. It's not as fast but it could be faster than trying to figure out how to properly mount a USB NTFS hard drive and then manually copying the files over in a command line prompt.

I'm sure you will figure out a method which is best for you but I'd use the CIFS myself.

 

[pirateghost]

Sure you can,

You can't WRITE to NTFS, only READ from it. The import function imports the contents of the NTFS drive to a dataset/pool

 

[SweetAndLow]

You can't WRITE to NTFS, only READ from it. The import function imports the contents of the NTFS drive to a dataset/pool

He said you can connect it to a Windows host and backup. Connecting it to freenas would not work.

 

[halloween]

Inside my esxi (from win10-vm to freenas-vm) i get 10GBit network - so i think usb-controller is limiting the maximum speed.

 

[pirateghost]

He said you can connect it to a Windows host and backup. Connecting it to freenas would not work.

better re-read his post. ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

Yes, you can connect an NTFS drive directly to FreeNAS and mount it and write to it. It's not a GUI function, it's all CLI.

Here is how to do it and it worked on FreeNAS 9.10 several months ago so I see no reason it wouldn't work today.

adaXs1 = Where "X" is the drive, Example is "ada6".

mkdir /mnt/externaldrive
kldload fuse
ntfs-3g /dev/adaXs1 /mnt/externaldrive

Now while it can be done, the question is should it be done all the time and there was a reason NTFS write support was removed by default, just too many people having issues. This is why I also stated that using a CIFS share would be better and easier.

Here is a link you can look at for more details.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/connect-usb-external-drive-to-freenas.15150/

 

[pirateghost]

we had a user today that had issues because he mounted an NTFS disk manually exactly like that and it overwrote his modified dates on his NTFS disk during an rsync.

this is a bad idea.

 

[joeschmuck]

I didn't say it was a good idea, just that it can be done. Hopefully the OP reads our comments here and realizes that this is not for the faint of heart.

I for one would not leave a drive connected like this except just to transfer the files needed and then disconnect it. In my situation I was pulling off all my data before doing something which might have caused a data loss, thankfully whatever I was doing went fine and I didn't have to restore the data. Transferring over Ethernet would have taken way too long.

 

[MDK2016]

@Holloween, I am an ultra new noob also just for the record ;) but I think you are making this too complicated. I am not sure if you have already setup your back up share or not, if you have, most probably this is a CIFS or SMB share. Either of those can be read and written to by both Linux and Windows OS. Why can't you mount your USB external drive on your Windows or linux VM and just drag and drop your back up files from your NAS backup folder to the USB drive and then remove the USB drive? If you have not made a mapped drive to your NAS that is another option that you can consider on your Windows machine.

Cheers!