Fool-proof RAID setup for natural disaster

[borisko]

Hi everyone, pardon my questions if they're basic but despite my extensive searches I'm still new to Freenas and raid formats.

I am trying to achieve the perfect balance of redundancy, performance and safety in a home-enterprise environment.

My issue: the place I live in (Philippines) has risks of earthquake and other natural disasters, thus would need something I can grab and take "on the go" in case something goes wrong.

I have a 4TB Seagate backup plus external hard drive that I was thinking will be used for just that.

Here was my initial thought:

Get 2x4TB hdds (probably some WD red) set as mirrored/raid1 (for complete redundancy) and my external hdd as the 3rd mirror of those two.

I know it sounds overkill and a big loss of storage space, but I value safety over all as this will hold my daily data as well as some backups (will set up a 3rd back up off-site system along the way later).

Is it the best solution or the right raid setup though? Or at least is it possible to have 2 mirrors of a single drive under raid1 (and does it very badly affect performance)

Lastly, In case of natural disaster, can I just grab the external HDD and expect it to mount as a regular drive on another computer (which is the actual purpose of this setup).

Thanks in advance for your inputs!

 

[NASbox]

How are you creating the backup on the external HD? If you are using your PC to do it, than that should be fine, otherwise I would not recommend using a USB drive directly on FreeNAS. ZFS over USB is a disaster waiting to happen. You are also not going to be able to mount ZFS on Windows or MAC AFAIK-there may be a program to do it, but maybe someone else can tell you. Otherwise Linux can mount ZFS if you install ZFS support.

I would recommend that get removable drive mounts so that in the event of a natural disaster you can just power off the server and take the drives with you. You could also copy everything to the external drive with your Mac/Windows PC, and you should be able to access those files from common PCs/Laptops. Just bear in mind that a USB drive can suffer from reliability issues, so it would be Ideal to be able to take the server drives. Keep a copy of your FreeNAS configuration on a separate USB and with the original drives you can easily rebuild just by downloading a fresh copy of FreeNAS and reinstalling. Hope that helps.

 

[borisko]

Thanks for your answer. Just a precision, I didn't mention raid z1 but raid1, in other words mirroring (1 4tb drive and 2 mirrors of that 4tb drive) so I don't know how this could cause a problem since they're just copies of the 1st one. Or is there? Sorry my knowledge is limited.
I could indeed make copies of the 2 mirrored drives on my external hdd, but ideally I'd like a solution thst does this automatically. Hence my initial thoughts of using mirrored drives. Is that too risky? Or is there a solution inside freenas that can run say a script to copy (daily at night for example) incrementally the changes to my external drive?

 

[KevDog]

If your area is prone to natural disasters, it seems a more foolproof backup method in my opinion would be some remote site -- cloud or other external data center -- where you could back up your data away from the earthquake areas. In terms of use of a RAID1 setup -- I'm not sure what this exactly has to do with FreeNas.

 

[JaimieV]

I second the suggestion of having offsite over-the-network backups - in a disaster event you don't want to be scrabbling around for USB drives, and you may not be home anyway. I don't know if there are any Philippine-based equivalents, but I've been using Backblaze for years for my offsites. Backblaze have a guide (although it's for the old UI).