I am planning to buy a FreeNAS machine and my brother will buy one as well. The plan is to back-up our stuff on each other's FreeNAS machines so that if one of our houses burns down or whatever, we have a full copy of our data off-site. We each plan to buy 8 3TB drives, and put 4 in our own machine and 4 in the other's machine.
My question is, what kind of VDEV set-up and RAID level should we use? And how do we sync our local storage with the off-site storage? Furthermore, is there a way to enable encryption only in the remote machine without affecting performance on the local machine (while maintaining "incremental back-up" so we're not sending our whole filesystem over the internet every time we back-up)?
We do plan to buy processors with AES-NI, but we're not sure how punishing encryption would be even with AES-NI. We also prefer to use our 4 drives in a RAID-10 situation rather than RAID-Z2, because RAID-10 is faster and we're okay with the (small) risk that two disks fail in the same mirror, since we can always fall back on the off-site backups, so it would take the failure of a minimum of 4 disks (and up to 6) before complete data loss. We're also considering downsizing to 7 drives each, and have the off-site storage be RAID-Z1 (with 3 drives) instead, since the performance doesn't matter, does that make sense?
My question is, what kind of VDEV set-up and RAID level should we use? And how do we sync our local storage with the off-site storage? Furthermore, is there a way to enable encryption only in the remote machine without affecting performance on the local machine (while maintaining "incremental back-up" so we're not sending our whole filesystem over the internet every time we back-up)?
We do plan to buy processors with AES-NI, but we're not sure how punishing encryption would be even with AES-NI. We also prefer to use our 4 drives in a RAID-10 situation rather than RAID-Z2, because RAID-10 is faster and we're okay with the (small) risk that two disks fail in the same mirror, since we can always fall back on the off-site backups, so it would take the failure of a minimum of 4 disks (and up to 6) before complete data loss. We're also considering downsizing to 7 drives each, and have the off-site storage be RAID-Z1 (with 3 drives) instead, since the performance doesn't matter, does that make sense?