Greetings everyone!

[blucube]

Just popping in to say hey! I'm really not too terribly of a social person but - I've recently made a build and dove right into my first NAS / Unix system (and really any *nix experience whatsoever). So, I've found myself benefiting greatly from these online communities / repos etc. which obligates me to at least say hello and thanks to everyone who puts the time and efforts into letting users like myself ride your coat tails.

This all began by wanting to create an easy solution for non-technical people to have a centralized location to store and share photos/videos of my new born twins - as cell phones and cameras etc. regularly die and data loss can be so heart breaking (at least until you get over it and move on). Though the compression over SMS was additionally causing issues when people would go to Walgreens and print photos and then blame the employee's for not knowing why the photos looked like garbage (although I wouldn't recommend going to Walgreens to print in most cases but, it wasn't 100% Walgreens issue). Not to mention the videos are often pathetic.

Many users on other forums I frequent when I have technical questions from time to time, were quick to suggest solutions such as Google, DropBox etc... these are great solutions - but they did not satisfy the project/tinkerer in me. I considered Synology as many probably do... but going back to my personal satisfaction plus some good points about proprietary hardwares when upgrading or replacing in event of failure etc... FreeNAS is where I dropped the hammer.

This is also my first real server experience in general, I come from a history of Telecom & IP but nothing admin or server side - so I had and still have much much to learn. Right now I'm reading the debates about ECC etc. as I also come from a performance / gaming desktop background as well. Which - we do not need to discuss in any sort of reply to this thread as the information I've read has brought me to the light :) but just some superfluous input as to where I am at on my FreeNAS journey.

I really need to RTFM but - I am an impatient type and like to make excuses about not having the time and not necessarily being the scholarly type so... oft I find I learn best from real trial and error and wasting hours and hours and hours, days and months experimenting with small changes here and there and probing the results and then taking what info I can gather and then searching the web. As for whatever reason I don't seem to understand/retain/translate "technical documentation" in its base text form as well as I do seeing what doesn't work and what it took to fix it to truly comprehend. (I really do dislike this about me, but those hours and days turn to dust when I'm on the "scent"... it's not healthy I'm sure)

Though after all that, I'm currently set up and boxing with jailed instances of Nextcloud, PMS, shadowsocks, OpenVPN, murmur/mumble, CloudflareDDNS and Transmission!

The only storage solution I had prior to this build was my performance Desktop PC... but it ran 24/7 with high voltages and OC and it finally just got to the point in my mind that... using this PC for a storage/streaming solution cannot be good for the hardware and is wasting life expectancy as well as $ - so, a low voltage high storage solution with the added benefits of some of the other server capabilities I listed using above that I didn't even think about going into this has been a wonderful eye opening experience! I'm just upset that it took me so long to start this journey as it has only been less than one year!

Either way I'll stop blabbering on and just state thanks to everyone once again!

 

[CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet]

Just popping in to say hey! I'm really not too terribly of a social person but - I've recently made a build and dove right into my first NAS / Unix system (and really any *nix experience whatsoever).

Hi blucube and welcome to the forums!

Let me be the first to perform the age old initiation ceremony of pointing out that FreeNAS isn't Unix... it's unix-like. I don't mean to nitpick but if I didn't say it, some one else probably would have.

This all began by wanting to create an easy solution for non-technical people to have a centralized location to store and share photos/videos of my new born twins - as cell phones and cameras etc. regularly die and data loss can be so heart breaking (at least until you get over it and move on).

That's an admirable motivation... then again, I would say that because that's why I started using FreeNAS in the first place. Just bare in mind the 3-2-1 Rule though. If you haven't heard of it before, it goes something like "unless you've got 3 copies of your data, on 2 different storage mediums, 1 of which is offsite... then it may as well not exist". You say (later in your comment) that you were advise other solutions such as "Google, Dropbox, etc....", whilst I personally would recommend either on ethical grounds, I do think it's a good idea to have something like a Western Digital external drive as a secondary backup. It's not as robust as another server / FreeNAS system but it's much, much better than nothing.

Congratulations on the sprogs by the way!

Though the compression over SMS was additionally causing issues when people would go to Walgreens and print photos and then blame the employee's for not knowing why the photos looked like garbage (although I wouldn't recommend going to Walgreens to print in most cases but, it wasn't 100% Walgreens issue). Not to mention the videos are often pathetic.

Physical prints are a very underrated form of backup IMHO.

Many users on other forums I frequent when I have technical questions from time to time, were quick to suggest solutions such as Google, DropBox etc... these are great solutions - but they did not satisfy the project/tinkerer in me. I considered Synology as many probably do... but going back to my personal satisfaction plus some good points about proprietary hardwares when upgrading or replacing in event of failure etc... FreeNAS is where I dropped the hammer.

Just going back to my suggestion of a Western Digital external drive, just be aware that there are certain models that should be avoided due to their idiotic implementation of encryption (that means if the enclosure dies, there's no way of accessing the data on the drive). There's a list of ssaid models floating around somewhere and I'll update this comment once I've found it.

In regards to tinkering, I'll address that in a moment.

Right now I'm reading the debates about ECC etc. as I also come from a performance / gaming desktop background as well. Which - we do not need to discuss in any sort of reply to this thread as the information I've read has brought me to the light but just some superfluous input as to where I am at on my FreeNAS journey.

I, or rather someone who really knows what they're talking about, will say one thing regarding ECC....

"There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.

I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."

- Matt Ahrens (co-founder of ZFS at Sun Microsystems and current ZFS developer at Delphix. )

I really need to RTFM but - I am an impatient type and like to make excuses about not having the time and not necessarily being the scholarly type so... oft I find I learn best from real trial and error and wasting hours and hours and hours, days and months experimenting with small changes here and there and probing the results and then taking what info I can gather and then searching the web. As for whatever reason I don't seem to understand/retain/translate "technical documentation" in its base text form as well as I do seeing what doesn't work and what it took to fix it to truly comprehend. (I really do dislike this about me, but those hours and days turn to dust when I'm on the "scent"... it's not healthy I'm sure)

I can relate to you there. I'm much more of a visual learner. I sometimes struggle to understand and retain text based information but it I see it in the form of a diagram or actually being put into action, I find it much easier. Which is one of the reason why it's good to tinker... as doing so doesn't put your data at risk. Which is why I'd recommend installing FreeNAS in a virtual machine purely for testing. I use VirtualBox and tinker to my hearts content when I need to get my head around something or when I want to do a few dry runs of setting up a new Jail.

Having said that, there are still some fantastic text based learning materials out there. For example, check out the links in my sig. I think they're essential reading.