NAS box vs cloud storage for FreeNAS backup solution

[patrick sullivan]

Not a fan of NAS box devices (synology for example). This is obvious or I wouldn't have FreeNAS and posting in this forum... :)

But, instead of spending lots of money on cloud storage (backing up maybe 20-40 Tb), it seems to make more sense to buy a NAS box to keep off site and shut down. Curious if anyone else is doing this, and what box they recommend for periodic backups (maybe monthly).

Cheers

 

[melloa]

it seems to make more sense to buy a NAS box to keep off site and shut down.

Assume someone will go there, power on the NAS ... why not two FreeNASes?

 

[patrick sullivan]

Assume someone will go there, power on the NAS ... why not two FreeNASes?

My idea of "off-site" is in the truck of my car :)

So, looking for something more portable. Not wanting to haul a separate PC and JOBD enclosure around.....

 

[melloa]

My idea of "off-site" is in the truck of my car

Heat + vibrations = bad things for disks and electronic components.

 

[patrick sullivan]

Heat + vibrations = bad things for disks and electronic components.

Sorry, not literally in the back of my car....but maybe in a basement of a friends house.

 

[Ericloewe]

You could make a fairly portable FreeNAS system.

separate PC and JOBD enclosure

Why would you, with FreeNAS? It's no different than the off-the-shelf NAS boxes out there, except that some of them might be more tightly integrated to allow for a smaller footprint.

 

[adrianwi]

This was exactly my plan when I upgraded my FreeNAS box! My old HP Microserver was going to be moved to a friends house with a nightly replication. Never actually got around to it as I set-up CrashPlan to provide the offsite backup, so the HP box is still sat next to my FreeNAS box acting as a local backup.

 

[patrick sullivan]

You could make a fairly portable FreeNAS system.

Why would you, with FreeNAS? It's no different than the off-the-shelf NAS boxes out there, except that some of them might be more tightly integrated to allow for a smaller footprint.

Wow, never thought of that. Glad I posted the question. I'll read through your backup system setup tonight. Thank you very much. I would much rather go that route. I just didn't want to buy and flash another IBM M1015 card and have a bunch of hardware to haul around....

 

[patrick sullivan]

This was exactly my plan when I upgraded my FreeNAS box! My old HP Microserver was going to be moved to a friends house with a nightly replication. Never actually got around to it as I set-up CrashPlan to provide the offsite backup, so the HP box is still sat next to my FreeNAS box acting as a local backup.

Easy to set up continuous backups between the two FreeNAS machines?

 

[Ericloewe]

Easy to set up continuous backups between the two FreeNAS machines?

If by "continuous" you mean "whenever a snapshot is taken", yes, very easy:
http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html#replication-tasks

The VPN part is left as an exercise for the reader.

 

[patrick sullivan]

If by "continuous" you mean "whenever a snapshot is taken", yes, very easy:
http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html#replication-tasks

The VPN part is left as an exercise for the reader.

I was avoiding snapshots because I read that they are resource heavy if you are dealing with large pool sizes like 30 Tb? I clearly need to understand snapshots more. I've read plenty, but still over my head at this point

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

 

[Ericloewe]

I was avoiding snapshots because I read that they are resource heavy if you are dealing with large pool sizes like 30 Tb?

No, that is completely wrong. Snapshots are free (besides the storage needed, of course) and scale to crazy numbers with no problem.

 

[patrick sullivan]

No, that is completely wrong. Snapshots are free (besides the storage needed, of course) and scale to crazy numbers with no problem.

Sorry, that is what I meant by resource heavy; that repeated snapshots of large pools will start to hog storage very quickly.

 

[Ericloewe]

No, they only take up whatever space is needed for the changes, plus a trivial amount of metadata. Pool size has nothing to do with it.

 

[patrick sullivan]

No, they only take up whatever space is needed for the changes, plus a trivial amount of metadata. Pool size has nothing to do with it.

Okay, just so I understand. If I have a 30Tb pool, and create a snapshot every month after adding a few new movies/pictures/etc, the space utilized by these snapshots will be trivial?

 

[adrianwi]

I've got a media dataset containing about 10TB of files. I take daily snapshots which I keep for a week and monthly snapshots I keep for 6 months (probably more than I actually need!) That's 13 snapshots which are using less than 10GB of space, and are used to replicate nightly to another FreeNAS box.

 

[patrick sullivan]

I've got a media dataset containing about 10TB of files. I take daily snapshots which I keep for a week and monthly snapshots I keep for 6 months (probably more than I actually need!) That's 13 snapshots which are using less than 10GB of space, and are used to replicate nightly to another FreeNAS box.

Okay, I will look at Ericloewe's backup setup. I will read more on snapshots. Build it. Then, try to configure the two to talk to one another. Do you have a detailed setup guide Adrian that you used? I know how to create a snapshot, but not how to have that snapshot automatically sent to my second machine and to have older snapshots automatically deleted upon the arrival of newer snapshots. Is that even possible?

 

[adrianwi]

The FreeNAS manual covers it all pretty well. Create the periodic snapshots (which includes the settings for deleting old one) and then add replication tasks to move them between machines.

 

[Stux]

Snapshots only incur a space penalty once they are referencing data that no longer exists anywhere else (other than snapshots)

 

[Evertb1]

Not a fan of NAS box devices (synology for example). This is obvious or I wouldn't have FreeNAS and posting in this forum... :)

But, instead of spending lots of money on cloud storage (backing up maybe 20-40 Tb), it seems to make more sense to buy a NAS box to keep off site and shut down. Curious if anyone else is doing this, and what box they recommend for periodic backups (maybe monthly).

Cheers

I have used a NAS (Zyxel) for some time as backup device. I have became a fan of rsync and that worked reasonably well with the NAS acting as rsync server and my Freenas box performing rsync push jobs. It was even somewhat of site because it was housed in a seperate building from my house.

After using this for a while a found I could do with a system with a bit more power as rsync operations gives a bit of a load for the CPU on the NAS. Most ideal would be an extra Freenas box as a replication target but buying Freenas worthy hardware was not in the budget.

So I took some stuff I had still lying around: Asus motherboard with Integrated Dual-Core AMD Zacate CPU and 8 GB memory. I also bought a small aluminium case, a small SSD (60 GB) and a decent PSU. Together with the harddisks from my NAS i had now a complete box. I also sold the NAS (without disks), recovering more then 50% of the cost of the new stuff ;)

I had already decided that I wanted to use OpenMediaVault on this box. I had toyed around a bit with it and using it as an rsync server worked out OK. I installed it on the "new" box and was even able to import the volume from the NAS as the file system from the NAS (EXT4) is the default for OMV. So now my backup device is an OMV box. And the hardware, while (very) modest, is more then powerfull enough for this task. It beats the NAS hands down.

I realy love Freenas. But I only use it if I can afford to buy the correct hardware. As I also backup to the cloud -I have 5 TB space- I feel that I now have a reasonable safe backup situation for my data.