Best Way to implement a Freenas machine for nightly backups

[legokill101]

So I am a college student looking to setup a freenas machine to do nightly backups of my laptops documents just in case. The question I have is two fold, the first being that being a college student and not wanting to buy parts for a whole new systems neither of the two ways I can think of for running it seem to be ideal. it is important to note that while using ZFS would be nice, since it creates problems in both scenarios I would be fine with just raid.
The first scenario would be running it on a raspberry pi I have with a couple of external drives. This is obviously not ideal from a performance and reliability standpoint.
the second scenario would be setting up a virtual machine on my windows 10 desktop to run nightly backups but after seeing everything about how problematic running it in a VM is I am wondering if this is at all viable.
So would either of these two scenarios be workable?
my second question relates to the fact I am a college student living on campus in that I am using the university wifi. what I want to know is would this create security issues with freenas, would i need to for example lock down the web interface and only use SSH to access the machine? note that being a technical school the IT department has no issues whatsoever with students running their own servers.
Thanks for the help

 

[pirateghost]

It would appear you need to do a little basic reading of the requirements for freenas. You may have come across bad info on the internet for an extremely old version of freenas that was touted as 'repurposing' an old computer for a nas, but freenas has not been that project for many many years.

A. You don't have a choice. There is no 'just raid'. It's zfs or you don't use freenas.

B. It won't run on arm architecture. Please review the requirements and realize why this is the case. Wrong architecture, too little ram, no sata controller, just plain all around no.

C. Considering the other points in my comment, you are very much in the category of 'do not attempt to virtualize freenas'

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

nightly backups of my laptops documents ... not wanting to buy parts for a whole new systems

You might consider subscribing to a cloud backup service such as CrashPlan or BackBlaze.