Dataset/Shares Setup Suggestions Please

[mjpatera]

Hello everyone,
I am new to FreeNAS and have been playing with it for a few weeks now on a VM just getting familiar with it and getting things to work. I now have my permanent box setup and i'm ready to start with the final setup so I can start using it. I'm looking for suggestions or best practices on how I should setup the datasets and shares. Just a little about my setup and what I'd like to use the system for- I am running FreeNAS from USB with 2 2TB drives that will be mirrored. This NAS will only be for system backups and to archive family photos/videos. I won't be doing any media servers or anything like that. Most of my use will be on Macs but I do have a 2 Windows PC that will also use the NAS occasionally. I would like to send Time Machine backups to the NAS. I would like to have one share that will be accessible from both the Windows and Macs using the same user login if possible. I will have another share for the time machine backups which will be 2 different Macs.

Should I create one dataset for the main share and one more for the 2 Time Machine backups? Would it be ok to have both Macs backing up to the same AFP share in separate folders or should they both have their own shares? For the share that will be used by both Windows and Mac, is the SMB share the only/best one to use?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Chris Moore]

Just a suggestion, you probably want to have more storage because this will give you only about 1.6 TB usable storage.
You can get some good advise on what hardware to buy if you ask, but it sounds like you have already skipped that and built a system.
I did that with my first NAS and made a bunch of mistakes that almost lost me my data, so I had to go get replacement hardware before a year was out.

 

[melloa]

@mjpatera - Take a look at https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/ and you will find several articles with best practices and hardware's recommendation. Also do some research on types of raidzs available. You might want to re-thing your strategy and use raidz2 to safeguard your data and allow to up to two disks to fail. Doing the mirror as above described, you will be in trouble if replacing a crashed HD or even replacing it with a bigger one to increase the pool space, the "good" hard drive fails.

 

[mjpatera]

Just a suggestion, you probably want to have more storage because this will give you only about 1.6 TB usable storage.
You can get some good advise on what hardware to buy if you ask, but it sounds like you have already skipped that and built a system.
I did that with my first NAS and made a bunch of mistakes that almost lost me my data, so I had to go get replacement hardware before a year was out.

Thanks. I will definitely be checking out the hardware forum in the near future. I haven't actually bought anything yet, just threw this system together with some unused hardware I had laying around. I am currently a full size CPU but hopefully soon i'm going to build a custom box just for this.

 

[Chris Moore]

Thanks. I will definitely be checking out the hardware forum in the near future. I haven't actually bought anything yet, just threw this system together with some unused hardware I had laying around. I am currently a full size CPU but hopefully soon i'm going to build a custom box just for this.

This is my second time in two days recommending this, but after doing a load of research, I think it is really the best bang for the buck.
Go ahead and get one of these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/172315518085

You don't have to fill it with drives from the start, you can add drives as your requirements grow. That is one of the nice things about ZFS. You can expand your storage pool by adding additional vdevs (virtual devices) when you need more storage. For example, I have two vdevs in my pool, each with 6 drives with a 2 drive redundancy factor in each vdev. That means that roughly the capacity of 8 drives is dedicated to storage while the capacity of 4 drives is dedicated to parity. The storage and parity are striped across all drives in the vdev, so if any drive fails it will not cause data loss. I keep two "cold spare" drives as a precaution if I need to replace a drive.
I am not sure how much background you have or how much reading you have done on this, but there is a lot to learn if you are new to FreeNAS and the ZFS file system.
This is a very powerful operating system with a load of capabilities. Don't let the name fool you. The operating system is free, but the hardware can set you back a little if you do it right. If you don't do the hardware right, you can loose your data or need to buy all over again because you bought the wrong hardware up front.

 

[Stux]

You should create a single dataset for your timemachine backups.

I call mine "tm_backups"

tm_backups should be a dataset with Mac permissions.

You should also consider creating a single user for time machine to backup via... I call mine "tm_user"

I then have the permissions on the tm_backups set like so:

Now, here's the trick, use OSX Server style TM quotas, not data set quotas!

I've underdocumented how to do it on this bug:
https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/17875

Basically, ssh into your server,

(assuming your pool is called "tank")

cd /mnt/tank/tm_backups
touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported
nano .com.apple.TimeMachine.quota.plist

then in the nano window paste:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>GlobalQuota</key>
<integer>2000000000000</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

But change "2000000000000" to how many bytes you want to allocate to each TM backup. Generally its recommended to be twice the size of the HD that you're backing up. I'm using 2TB... because... reasons.

Next, set up an AFP TimeMachine enabled share pointing at the dataset, and you can then point your macs at that, and login as tm_user.

(my server is named Titan)


All you need to do is ensure your pool is big enough for your time machine backups etc.

 

[Stux]

Since I went through the trouble, I decided to make a more formal HOWTO

HOW-TO: Setup Time Machine for multiple machines with OSX Server-Style Quotas