Idea for backups

[zetabax]

Hi there,

Creating an off-line backup of all your data is a ginormous pain with external drives. Ideally I'd like to find a piece of software that treats external USB drives as if they were LTO tapes but until that day comes (if ever) I'd like to try the following and wanted to see if anyone can validate my approach. This is for a home environment so I'm backing up photos, movies, music, etc. so my RPO / RTOs are 'whenever I get around to it' but the data must be there / recoverable.

1. Install TrueNas core onto either an old PC (on a USB stick) or VM (I have an ESXi box)

2. Connect a bunch of external hard drives to this instance of TrueNas and create a striped pool (RAID 0)

3. Create a replication task to copy all the data from my primary FreeNas box onto this hodgepodge of external storage

4. Once backup is complete, take the USB boot drive (or backup the VM) along with all the external hard drives and lock them up in a fireproof safe.

I realize creating a pool of USB HDDs isn't exactly safe or something you'd want to run long term but for the purposes of backup and recovery, does it seem reasonable?

 

[fidgety]

I'm sure this can be made to work but there are a few things to consider:

1) Raid 0 means if any disk in the pool fails, the whole pool fails. You might decide you can live with this... but you know a disk is bound to fail the moment you really need it...
2) These external hard drives - are they USB-attached ? Depending on the flavour of USB, these can be really slow. You can only trust a write when the slowest disk in the pool finishes.
3) There used to be a problem with hard drive spindles seizing after long periods of non-use. I don't know if there still is. If they are going to be in the safe for a long time, I guess you need to have a plan to refresh them once in a while, partly to be sure they still spin up.
4) The human factor... in other words, remembering to take those backups in the first place. It's human nature to put it off, and then desperately need to recover something important. I'd rather have something that runs 24x7 and doesn't need me to remember to do anything.

In summary - this is a hard problem. I've avoided it by having primary storage (in my workstation - all SSD), backup storage in my house (Truenas/ZFS - spinning rust) and then a cloud-based backup, automated (runs 24x7) and offsite. So I have 3 copies of each file. (Actually, more, since the Truenas box has multiple backup sets and incrementals).

 

[Arwen]

For me, my backups can fit on a single 8TB disk. Even with snapshots so I have a bit of history.
Wrote up a resource on what I did;

https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/how-to-backup-to-local-disks.26/