Hi all,
Great community here, I've enjoyed browsing for a few weeks. I've got a question I haven't quite seen previously addressed. Based on the advice here I've purchased hardware for my first FreeNAS box (5x3 TB encrypted RAIDZ2). Because that's for storage, not for backup, I'm probably going to build a second FreeNAS box for backup # 1. But I need a backup # 2 that will be offsite, and can also be readable by other people who don't have technical knowledge of how FreeNAS works. I'm currently thinking the offsite backup could be a 4x3 TB RAIDZ1 group of disks that are created by mounting in a FreeNAS server, then removed and put into a safe deposit box or something. So they'll be offline most of the time, but if at the time they're needed there's any corruption, there's at least one extra disk for parity, and all the self-healing characteristics of ZFS would be available if needed upon mounting for data retrieval.
I've got an old x86 desktop system with 8GB of non-ECC memory I could repurpose to use for read-only access to the offsite backup for the non-technical individuals who just need to be able to turn it on and access the data over a local network. I know that unfortunately the ZFS backups would not be readable under Windows. Also, I see from this post (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/raidz2-hung-after-zvol-delete.15759/#post-79334) that installing FreeNAS and mounting the backups as read only will still put the data at risk because the ZFS daemon will attempt to correct errors, so the non-ECC memory is a problem with that solution.
But I could install linux, or FreeBSD and configure the old hardware to share the mounted backup drives as CIFS shares over a network. So I have two questions:
1. Is it safe for the data to mount read only the ZFS backups using linux, FreeBSD, or some other solution that I can install on the old machine with non-ECC memory?
2. If there's no safe way to mount ZFS backups on a machine with non-ECC memory, does this group have any recommendations for an alternative filesystem to use for the offsite, cold backups I'm aiming for, that will also protect against bitrot and could be accessed without a lot of technical skill?
Thanks!
Great community here, I've enjoyed browsing for a few weeks. I've got a question I haven't quite seen previously addressed. Based on the advice here I've purchased hardware for my first FreeNAS box (5x3 TB encrypted RAIDZ2). Because that's for storage, not for backup, I'm probably going to build a second FreeNAS box for backup # 1. But I need a backup # 2 that will be offsite, and can also be readable by other people who don't have technical knowledge of how FreeNAS works. I'm currently thinking the offsite backup could be a 4x3 TB RAIDZ1 group of disks that are created by mounting in a FreeNAS server, then removed and put into a safe deposit box or something. So they'll be offline most of the time, but if at the time they're needed there's any corruption, there's at least one extra disk for parity, and all the self-healing characteristics of ZFS would be available if needed upon mounting for data retrieval.
I've got an old x86 desktop system with 8GB of non-ECC memory I could repurpose to use for read-only access to the offsite backup for the non-technical individuals who just need to be able to turn it on and access the data over a local network. I know that unfortunately the ZFS backups would not be readable under Windows. Also, I see from this post (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/raidz2-hung-after-zvol-delete.15759/#post-79334) that installing FreeNAS and mounting the backups as read only will still put the data at risk because the ZFS daemon will attempt to correct errors, so the non-ECC memory is a problem with that solution.
But I could install linux, or FreeBSD and configure the old hardware to share the mounted backup drives as CIFS shares over a network. So I have two questions:
1. Is it safe for the data to mount read only the ZFS backups using linux, FreeBSD, or some other solution that I can install on the old machine with non-ECC memory?
2. If there's no safe way to mount ZFS backups on a machine with non-ECC memory, does this group have any recommendations for an alternative filesystem to use for the offsite, cold backups I'm aiming for, that will also protect against bitrot and could be accessed without a lot of technical skill?
Thanks!
