How do most people tend to backup their FreeNAS content?

[CraftyClown]

Evening fellas,

I have my FreeNAS box coming together nicely and I thought I would start looking into getting a good reliable backup system going. I was just wondering if there is a preferred way that most FreeNAS users tend to go about this?

I currently have 2 x mirrored ZPools on my box. One is 4TB and the other one is 1TB. I would like it all regularly backed up for security and peace of mind.

I was considering backing up the windows shares from a PC, as I can hook up a nice fast external drive, but I'm open to ideas if there is a more practical or sensible solution I can be considering. It's a damn shame FreeNAS doesn't have a reliable write to NTFS function as being a PC user, this would be my first choice. But hey ho, you can't have it all ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

My valuable data resides on a 64GB USB3.0 Flash drive which is backed up to the FreeNAS box twice a day. This data also is manually written to a CD periodically. Other data which resides on my FreeNAS box are music files which I've paid for via iTunes or music I ripped from my old CD collection and those are copied to one of the home computers for safe keeping on a daily basis (as files change) but I also backup those music files to DVD's twice a year manually. Everything is automated except the creation of CD\DVD media.

Now the rest of the crap on my FreeNAS box are backup images of my household computer systems, videos, ISO images to make loading my virtual machines faster, etc... Nothing I couldn't live without so those are not backed up.

The down side to my backup method is everything is located inside my house so if the house burns down, all the data is gone as well. I have been considering a cloud site for my valuable data but haven't gone through with it yet. I may just toss one of my sons a small NAS unit that I could SFTP into or something just to store my data.

 

[CraftyClown]

Hi guys, sorry to bump this, but any other efficient backup systems people are using? I want to put something in place this weekend. Cheers

 

[JaimieV]

I built a second FreeNAS box and backup to that, using the builtin rsync scheduled tasks system (not using zfs push because the arrays are different sizes and I'm skipping some of the data).

You could use that rsync scheduling to push data over to a local USB drive. Or if you have a unixy box lying around (Linux or Mac) you can rsync the backp data to that. Wouldn't bother with trying to set Windows up as an rsync destination, there don't seem to be any good ports.

Wasn't someone working on a Crashplan plugin? Did that ever come to fruition?

/Edit - Oh, I see it did! Excellent. For those who don't know, Crashplan (see the website) allows you to do free peer-to-peer backups with history, as well as paid backups to the Crashplan servers. I backup my important stuff to a relative's house using it.

 

[alexg]

Crafty, did you try searching the forums. There are plenty of posts on this topic. My strategy: replicate daily to local tank; rsync weekly to UFS external drive (will move this to another system eventually), crashplan nightly of most important files to cloud.

 

[CraftyClown]

Sorry Alex, I did have a root around but I was just coming across very technical posts and as a newbie, they were going right over my head.

Oh dear, it does seem this is all geared towards those with far better technical knowledge and understanding of FreeNas than I. Crashplan looks fantastic, but I was stumped at the first hurdle of installing the plugin :(

I take it there aren't any suggested back up systems that are a little more straightforward?

 

[DrKK]

Clown:

I've said this in a few other posts. There's a windows-based solution that I personally like. "SyncBackFree" by 2brightsparks software. You can google it in about two seconds. I have an external drive plugged into a windows 7 box, and there's a share from the FreeNAS it can access.

Every night at 2am, it looks to see if there's anything on the zpool that is different than what's on the backup external drive. If there is, it grabs it. Very simple, the interface is all menu driven for people that aren't necessarily power users, etc. You could try that. This is very effective when you have a smallish pool that'll fit on an external drive.

 

[CraftyClown]

Thanks so much once again DrKK, this sounds ideal for a poor ignoramus like me :)

I shall take a look at this solution now and over the coming months school myself in FreeNas, so that I can better understand some of these other solutions

Thanks again

 

[DrKK]

Thanks so much once again DrKK, this sounds ideal for a poor ignoramus like me :)

I shall take a look at this solution now and over the coming months school myself in FreeNas, so that I can better understand some of these other solutions

Thanks again

Stay tuned. Cyberjock and I and a few of us have been talking about something that newer people might enjoy in terms of getting their feet wet. We'll see how far we get with it this weekend. :)

 

[CraftyClown]

Brilliant. I shall keep my eyes peeled for that :)

 

[panz]

The down side to my backup method is everything is located inside my house so if the house burns down, all the data is gone as well. I have been considering a cloud site for my valuable data but haven't gone through with it yet.

My most important data are automatically uploaded to Amazon S3 via Duplicati software (which encrypts the data before they leave the system) every hour. In my opinion S3 is the best service available.

 

[joeschmuck]

My most important data are automatically uploaded to Amazon S3 via Duplicati software (which encrypts the data before they leave the system) every hour. In my opinion S3 is the best service available.

Thanks for that information, never heard of Duplicati but I'm using it now with Google Drive. I was going to use my ISP but they only give me 80MB of free storage which is just a tease. Google Drive gives up 15GB free per user account which is much more than I'll ever need. And I did look into the Amazon S3, looks impressive but I'll give Google Drive a try first to see if it meets my needs and if not I will keep in mind Amazon S3.

What I do like about Duplicati is it appears to compress data as well, although I'd say 99% of my important files are PDF and encrypted financial program data so I don't benefit much by compression. Also it was very easy to setup on my Windows system.

 

[alexg]

I'm not trying to make this into vendor comparison thread, but keep in mind that S3 and Drive charge by GB. I prefer CrashPlan pricing model and it supports encryption on my machine before it sends it over internet.

 

[panz]

S3 doesn't charge for uploads, so it is very good for backups (you pay only if you recover data). Then, S3 charges for storage: it's very cheap (I have 1 PC, 1 Mac and 3 laptops constantly uploading backups and they only charge me € 0,14 each month!)

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

What I'm using is a set of three external drives (so far I'm buying big enough drives that a backup set is one drive; obviously this doesn't work for bigger file servers, you have to use sets of drives, ideally held in some kind of suitable case). Each one contains a ZFS filesystem that's a complete copy of what's on the main server, including snapshots. (The external backup drives don't have to be as big as the disk in the file server, just big enough for the actual data on the fileserver.)

The snapshots are the key; they let me keep a set of backups going back years at the maximum, plus very frequent recent ones (every couple of hours), all together in one place.

And I'm using scripts I wrote myself employing "zfs send" (and "zfs receive") to update them by incremental transmissions from the master. Since it's integrated into the backup, it doesn't have the problem of a large pile of individual incremental backups you have to sort through manually when you need to find something; it's a mountable ZFS volume (including mountable on a laptop booted from a Solaris livecd, say).

(This is a Solaris ZFS box, not FreeNAS, but the basic technology works fine for FreeNAS also.)

Our plan for the big FreeNAS box I just built is to build another one, put it in a different location, and use something like zfs send/receive or maybe rsync to keep them in sync. ZFS send/receive will be much more efficient, but will break down if we ever write to the backup box (reading from it is okay though).

 

[panz]

I have a 24 drive case: I pull the backup disk set after replication. Next year I'm going to do the same setup as yours: build another NAS box and put it in another location. I prefer replication over rsync.

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I need to experiment with FreeNAS replication and understand it. I'm looking at whether it's possible to convert my old Solaris box to a FreeNAS box and run it that way in future, that would give me a second box to experiment on with things like replication.

(Actually, I'm trying to rein myself in and get the new box running reliably and get things like scrubs and snapshot schedules set up before I dive in any deeper.)

 

[panz]

Replication on FreeNAS is very good: it takes care of the snapshots, it replicates the old ones and set the "LATEST" to the last-in-time (the one you could rollback). Easy.