Need backup design help

[RadarG]

Here is the equipment that I have currently, dell poweredge 2950 and T310 both with no drives, dell poweredge t110 with 1T,250,1G. They are used for three data stores. One of the data stores is shooting an iSCSI target to the wife's comp and 320G of family videos and 15 years of pictures is backup up through carbonite. I have only a base image of the wife's comp as a backup on an external drive. I have no backup of my VMs and no backup of the 2tb drive in the living room. I would like to be able to have backups of everything and pump it through carbonite. I was thinking of setting up the 2950 as freenas but what is the best config for it? And what is the best way to back it up. I do have a remote site I can used I was thinking of using rsync to back everything to the remote site. Any tips would be most welcome. Thanks

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

I looked a little bit at the 2950 and it's quite an old beast. Depending on your configuration and installed memory it might not be a good fit. Also I seem to recall that they had some dell-specific raid-controller which could be a problem.

If backup is your only goal then you may want to just invest in Crashplan or Backblaze.

However if you wish to figure out more I would advice you to read the freenas manual and the hardware sticky threads. They will tell you what you need to know about running FreeNas.

 

[RadarG]

Can I setup a Z2 pool and use the two other drives for spares? Can I run the os from a USB drive? The 2950 can handle 6 drives. What is my best config? Can I hook up a pair of USB external drives and use them as a full backup and another to store snaps?