PhiloEpisteme
Guru
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2018
- Messages
- 969
I have long been an avid user of Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. As I grow older the amount of data I own grows and I am less excited about having all of my data in the cloud. I’ve thus starting thinking about building and maintaining my own data server at home. I’ve put some time into considering my requirements and significant time into reading about FreeNAS. I realize that there exists a certain amount of bias in even asking this question here but I ask it all the same. Given my list of requirements below, is FreeNAS a good solution from a technical point of view?
Storage
I’d like my data to be very secure against loss
I’d like my data to be very secure against theft
I realize that this is quite complicated and depends a lot on if and how I expose my data outside of my home network. To keep it relevant to the security of the disks themselves I take this to mean secure against theft of my hardware, likely therefore meaning encryption.
I'd like to gain more experience building and maintaining servers!
From the points listed above I guess there are a few sub-questions.
Storage
- I’d like to start with ~10TB of space. I’d likely need that to grow in the future.
- Roughly 2TB of that would be allocated to sensitive data such as business records, personal finances, etc. Ideally this data would not be available unless needed. I’m imagining this data living on encrypted drives (or in encrypted pools) that are only mounted when needed.
- The remaining data is less sensitive. Think family photos etc. I would still like this data to be encrypted in case of hardware theft but to be generally available.
I’d like my data to be very secure against loss
- 2 disk failure
- I would like to maintain a once-weekly on-site backup to encrypted storage.
- I would like to maintain a twice-monthly off-site backup. I would like this to be encrypted such that if I chose to use one of Amazon’s storage solutions I would be protected against someone accessing the data there.
I’d like my data to be very secure against theft
I realize that this is quite complicated and depends a lot on if and how I expose my data outside of my home network. To keep it relevant to the security of the disks themselves I take this to mean secure against theft of my hardware, likely therefore meaning encryption.
I'd like to gain more experience building and maintaining servers!
From the points listed above I guess there are a few sub-questions.
- Is it reasonable to unmount a zfs pool when it is not in use such that the only way to access the data is to have the encryption key?
- What about external backups? Do folks typically just use cloud solutions or are on-prem backups reasonable?
