External eSata Backup?

[Jaraeez]

Hi all,

I have a question I hope someone can answer regarding eSata.

I run Freenas on a N54L Microserver (updated hacked Bios) & currently have a Mirror (2x3TB in 2 of the 4 free bays) & a Stripe (1x1TB in the top CD bay) running in ZFS.

I would like to start a backup of these drives & have bought (not received yet) 1 3TB drive along with an eSata external enclosure (Vantec NST-D300SU3).

My initial thoughts where to attach the eSata externally to the N54L & run some sort of rsync script probably once a week. I then started to do some research to see if there was a better way to achieve my goal (I also read some scary stuff regarding external eSata on the Freenas though I may of missed the context).

It seems that I could do what I plan, or I could install the 3TB into a free internal bay then use it as back up (although I am planning to eventually add another mirror 2x3TB & would need to move what ever data I had backed up somewhere else!). Or I could attach the eSata to another machine (Windows or Linux though not sure yet if I have a machine with eSata) & do a remote back up.

As you may see I'm quite confused to which way to go, any ideas?

Cheers

Code:

Build    FreeNAS-9.2.1.5-RELEASE-x64 (80c1d35)
Platform    AMD Turion(tm) II Neo N54L Dual-Core Processor
Memory    10186MB

 

[joeschmuck]

If this is truly a backup of your data on the NAS then I would recommend you keep the new hard drive separate from the NAS. What if the power supply took a hit and took out your entire NAS computer? There are a lot of possible scenarios but if you keep them separate then the risk is less. Some kind of RSync would be good, it would maintain a backup and only update changed data and that can be done over Ethernet without issue. There are other options and I think you will be exploring them. Good Luck.

 

[bestboy]

I'm testing a similar setup for backups as we speak. eSATA works just fine. The only thing you should probably avoid, is using eSATA with port multipliers. Port multipliers usually come into play when you have a multi-bay drive enclosure with a single eSATA output. Then all drives have to share this one connection which may be problematic. However, this is not relevant to you at all since you plan to use just a single drive via eSATA.

As to how to do the backup you should check your usecase.
If you want to use the backup drive also on another computer, then I'd go for a file based backup with rsync.
If you just want to make sure your NAS has a backup, then I'd suggest to create a 1-disk backup pool with the eSATA drive and do ZFS replication via zfs send/receive.

 

[Jaraeez]

Cheers ppl for you feed back much appreciated.

Yeah I did read about the port multipliers & yes I will be avoiding it :).

Well I guess I should be ok to connect it using eSata & will probably format it using UFS & do rsync.

Thanks