Disaster Recovery & Planning Questions

[Scott McCarthy]

I am fairly new to FreeNas and have a question about disaster recovery and the best way to setup the NAS, etc. I have read through the hardware requirements and setup recommendations but would like to get some real world feedback so we can properly prepare.

My questions are below. I would like to thank everyone in advance who answers. I also plan to write DR guide for FreeNAS and share it freely:

1. What is the best way to setup the boot drives? Will two SSDs mirrored work? I noticed FreeNAS doesn't recommend RAID cards so can the boot drives be mirrored by FreeNAS in the event one of the boot drives fails? I plan to use at least 4 data drives for the software data RAID set.

2. In theory, if you lost your boot drives but had your data drives, I am guessing you can install FreeNAS again and restore the config file to get going again. Is there anyway to restore the system if you lose the boot drives and don't have a config file or are you just screwed?

3. Is there anyway to program the system to save a config file to a network location everyday or on a pre-set time instead of having to save manually?

4. If you lose a boot drive or data drive, does FreeNAS notify you? If so, is it simply a matter of shutting the system down, replacing the drive and telling the system to re-sync with the replaced drive? Is there a document or documented procedure on how to replace a failed drive?

I just want to make sure I know exactly what to do if I ever lose the boot drive or a mirrored or software RAIDED drive in the data drive set. I thank you in advance for any information you can provide!

 

[Bidule0hm]

1. It depends. Yes.

2. Yes. No config backup = no config backup. But seriously, it's just a small file so you can backup it really easily ;)

3. No, but you can always setup a cron task to do it.

4. Yes. See the manual for the replacing procedure (link is on top of the forum's pages).

 

[Scott McCarthy]

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by it depends on #1? Is there a better way to handle it? Can FreeNAS software mirror the two boot drives if I wanted to set it up that way? In the lab, I have actually taken a FreeNAS server and erased the boot drive and reloaded FreeNAS and put the config file in place and it worked great. It restored the box and found the drives and everything. Absolutely amazing.

A few follow up questions:

1. Does anyone have documentation on how to create a cron job to backup the config? I am not that strong with cron jobs yet.

2. What is the best way to setup the boot drive config? Two SSDs software mirrored?

Also, one more I forgot to ask:

What if there is a software problem one day and the server just won't boot - a module goes bad or something happens. Is the best course of action to reload and restore with the config?

Thanks again in advance. I want to make sure we are covered if we start using these heavily in production. I am very impressed with the flexibility of the software and the speed! We are now using NetGear business NAS units and they are great - very easy to administer, very solid units and great OS software. However, we hit their performance limits pretty quick because they don't have the processor speed, etc. The FreeNAS concept is great because you can throw as much power as you want at it. I love the concept!

I just need to make sure FreeNAS is going to be as stable as our current solution before we move over to it completely. Thanks again in advance!

Scott

 

[Bidule0hm]

It depends on what is your definition of best way :)

See the manual for the cron task, it's accessible in the GUI, no need to use the CLI.

Yes, really bad problem on the OS = just re-install and import the config ;)

 

[jgreco]

I am fairly new to FreeNas and have a question about disaster recovery and the best way to setup the NAS, etc. I have read through the hardware requirements and setup recommendations but would like to get some real world feedback so we can properly prepare.

My questions are below. I would like to thank everyone in advance who answers. I also plan to write DR guide for FreeNAS and share it freely:

1. What is the best way to setup the boot drives? Will two SSDs mirrored work?

Yes

I noticed FreeNAS doesn't recommend RAID cards so can the boot drives be mirrored by FreeNAS in the event one of the boot drives fails?

We don't recommend RAID cards for use with your ZFS pool. Some of us do actually use RAID cards for boot; BR10i's are cheap and well supported. However, with 9.3, the OS is also ZFS and can be set up redundantly. Whether or not your BIOS can do anything meaningful with the second flash device is another question. So you can do a RAID card for boot and get RAID-BIOS-supported redundant booting or you can do redundant flash and get a situation where maybe you have to manually select a secondary boot device.

I plan to use at least 4 data drives for the software data RAID set.

2. In theory, if you lost your boot drives but had your data drives, I am guessing you can install FreeNAS again and restore the config file to get going again. Is there anyway to restore the system if you lose the boot drives and don't have a config file or are you just screwed?

3. Is there anyway to program the system to save a config file to a network location everyday or on a pre-set time instead of having to save manually?

4. If you lose a boot drive or data drive, does FreeNAS notify you? If so, is it simply a matter of shutting the system down, replacing the drive and telling the system to re-sync with the replaced drive? Is there a document or documented procedure on how to replace a failed drive?

I just want to make sure I know exactly what to do if I ever lose the boot drive or a mirrored or software RAIDED drive in the data drive set. I thank you in advance for any information you can provide!

 

[DrKK]

3. Is there anyway to program the system to save a config file to a network location everyday or on a pre-set time instead of having to save manually?

So, you can really save your backup configs to the pool in some directory. Point being: If your pool dies, your config won't be that useful anyway. If something else dies, but not your pool, you can always reimport your pool, and get at the directory where you stored the config files. Cyberjock and I use a script like this to store our config, every day, on a directory in the pool:

Code:

[root@giskard] /mnt/drkk/config_backups# cat backupscr.sh
cp /data/freenas-v1.db /mnt/drkk/config_backups/`date +%Y%m%d`.db
chmod 444 /mnt/drkk/config_backups/`date +%Y%m%d`.db

[root@giskard] /mnt/drkk/config_backups#

Obviously you would change this to what you needed for your setup. I set up a cron task right in the FreeNAS gui to call this script every night at 10pm.

 

[jgreco]

Asimov huh.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

2. In theory, if you lost your boot drives but had your data drives, I am guessing you can install FreeNAS again and restore the config file to get going again. Is there anyway to restore the system if you lose the boot drives and don't have a config file or are you just screwed?

Just to be completely clear, if you lose the boot drives and the config file, you can still do a clean install of FreeNAS and import the pool. You lose your configuration (shares etc), but not your data.

 

[Elo]

There is a disaster recovery option under the advanced menu. My system is toasted (some files where overwritten due to a stupid mistake) and I have a backup created through the advanced menu where I did NOT mark the Backup the data box. In the manual it is stated:

Warning

the backup and restore options are meant for disaster recovery. If you restore a system, it will be returned to the point in time that the backup was created. If you select the option to save the data, any data created after the backup was made will be lost. If you donot select the option to save the data, the system will be recreated with the same ZFS layout, but with no data.

Does this mean that the zfs volumes will contain NO data after a restore or simply that the data content is not changed so that any data added after the backup is retained?

 

[Ericloewe]

Uhmm, as long as your pool is ok, just reinstall FreeNAS.

 

[Elo]

I have already reinstalled and imported the pools. I have several applications installed in Jails and I would prefer to re install all as it is a significant job.. Its also running a Virtualbox with W7 installed.

I guess you don't know then given you answer ?

 

[danb35]

The backup feature isn't well documented, so it's hard to say exactly what it does and doesn't do. But your jails live on your pool--all you should need to do is point your jail config toward that location and it should recognize the jails.