older desktop as a NAS for system backups

[Adrian]

Exactly my point 8GB RAM is twice what those servers come with. Not exactly re-using existing hardware either, you had to buy that as a storage server. The original poster wanted to reuse a PC. He's basically in the wrong place if he wants to build a server out of a spare PC. I do it all the time using ClearOS. RAID card and XFS seems pretty solid. Had some drives break but no data loss.

It was a spare machine. Originally I had been using it as a firewall (hence the second NIC), then as an ESXi server (hence the additional 4 GB of memory), and finally as a NAS when I decided to ditch my old clunker of a FreeBSD workstation (with ZFS and acting as NFS and SMB NAS) and use a NAS and a small box as the workstation, Well written appliances are good. I no longer knit my own (FreeBSD) firewalls either. pfSense is so much easier

I was wrong about the disks. Those I did buy were 4 * 2 TB Reds and 2 spares.

You would definitely need to mirror those hard drives. The Green WD ones last about 6 months and then stop working. The Blue ones seem OK though.

The problem with WD Greens is that they park the heads after 7 seconds of inactivity, Possibly OK in a consumer Windows PC, fine an USB enclosure occasionally plugged in for for backup or transfer, but bad on a machine which accesses disks quite frequently, causing up to 100 load cycles an hour. The WD limit on load cycles was 300,000.

I had WD Greens in the old clunker as a RAIDZ1, and circumvented the load cycle problem with a script which forced the disks to be accessed every 4 seconds. Others found that wdidle3(?) could be used to extend the idle time. As far as I can remember the old clunker was new in 2009 (originally a built to order state of the art games machine which the supplier was selling at a discount as the original customer no longer wanted it) and I retired it in late 2015 still with the original WD Greens. Machine turned on almost continuously for all those years.

In any case, WD Greens, and many other consumer drives, are not that suitable for use in a NAS as they have a very long time out on error recovery, which can cause the disk to be dropped out of the RAID. This can sometimes be turned off. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control and many other places.

Very wise to encrypt your data before giving it to Amazon. I'd be concerned about who's software was doing the encryption too.

Personally, I would be very chary of storing any of my data unencrypted on somebody else's machine / cloud. I wonder if the TrueNAS S3 Backup option can encrypt, and if FreeNAS 10 S3 Peering is the same / similar. I don't have a FreeNAS 10 machine to play with. I did try it on a Microserver, but it was so dreadfully slow (the Turion is quite a sloth - http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Turion+II+Neo+N40L+Dual-Core ). I am not paranoid enough to want to inspect the source of what I use at home (it is available), though at $JOB I insisted that we built FreeBSD and packages from source, to ensure that we had it all, to facilitate patching and allow code inspection.

 

[wblock]

It's still expense. It costs no money if you lose priceless photos since they are lost and have no monetary value. So no, it's not a saving to spend the money on special hardware it's just insurance against loss of your photos.

It was not a thought experiment. Twice, I have attempted to recover desperately-wanted photos from crashed hard drives for people. Both times, the hardware failure of the drive prevented that. Both times, the pictures were so valuable that a disk data recovery service was considered. If everything went well, it would have cost several thousand dollars. Having a NAS with hardware redundancy and filesystem checksums like ZFS would have avoided the whole problem. As it was, both parties could not afford the data recovery route and so a large part of their family history was wiped out. If they could have afforded the data recovery service, they still might not have got their photos back. Had the NAS been sitting there, it would either have prevented the loss or saved several thousand dollars. Either one is a win.

I understand your point, which is that servers with more than 4GB of RAM and multi-terabyte disks seem like overkill. They aren't, not any more.

 

[Wayland Sothcott]

.... Twice, I have attempted to recover desperately-wanted photos from crashed hard drives for people. Both times, the hardware failure of the drive prevented that. ....

Sometimes people are desperate to get their files back but mostly they seem to know when it's on a computer it can get lost. I've fixed broken hard drives twice and failed once. The drive would not run so I went on ebay and bought an identical working drive. Quite a lot of money for a 20GB drive. I swapped the controller board and fixed the drive so I could recover the data. The time I failed I even went as far as taking the platters out and sticking them in the working drive. Too far gone by that point.

I don't know what the best approach is to keep data for years. I've been copying it from one system to the next. Making CDs and DVDs seems OK until you come to read them and find they don't read. I much prefer a hot system for keeping data alive. There are risks what ever you do.

However the ordinary person has no clue about this stuff and regularly loses photos when their phone breaks or they lose their online password or their computer PSU breaks. Most data recovery is easy. Just take the drive out and plug it in a USB port of a working computer. But then you get the iPhone that the USB port is broken and it won't work by WiFi until you have first connected by USB.

Having a server of your own is a good idea. The problem is that it will break at some point. An ordinary person would no know they are a drive down since it would carry on working. They would wait until it's completely busted before calling.

 

[Adrian]

It's still expense. It costs no money if you lose priceless photos since they are lost and have no monetary value. So no, it's not a saving to spend the money on special hardware it's just insurance against loss of your photos.

Insurance against the loss of the things you care about is important. A good thing to spend money on.

Examples:

My daughter was heartbroken when the ancient computer she stored all her irreplaceable photographs of her young children on became badly virus ridden. No backups. She would have paid a fortune locally to get them back, but then thought of asking me. I used SystemRescueCD, FTP'd photographs to a FreeBSD box, removed any dubious looking files, ClamAV (nothing found), check (with file) that her images did appear to be images, burnt to DVDs and returned. Then replaced the disk and rebuilt the system from scratch, recycling it as a music player for my brother.

I had a collection of several thousand CDs, mainly full price, some exotic, mostly ripped as low bandwidth WMA files (some now unplayable under Windows) or low bandwidth MP3s. Due to lack of space and brother's interest I lent them to him long term. I was horrified a year later to discover that most of them had been stolen and he had been frightened of telling me. So, no chance of any insurance claim and a big replacement cost, which I chose to spend instead on very resilient storage / backup arrangements. Nowadays I rip a CD soon after receipt (EAC and lame -v0), listen to it while travelling, then store it away. All subsequent listening is done from well backed up files. I can seldom tell the difference between lame -v0 MP3s and FLACs so there is no point in me using FLAC.

 

[wblock]

An ordinary person would no know they are a drive down since it would carry on working.

This is why FreeNAS has alerts and notifications.

 

[Adrian]

I don't know what the best approach is to keep data for years. I've been copying it from one system to the next. Making CDs and DVDs seems OK until you come to read them and find they don't read. I much prefer a hot system for keeping data alive. There are risks what ever you do.

CDs and DVDs rot. Layers of tape stick together, and the oxide falls off the tape. Disks left stationary can jam. Devices and interfaces become obsolete (I have an 8" floppy somewhere). Spinning disks fail. Dodgy software or hardware sprays digital rubbish over your disk. (Right block content, wrong block is not unknown.)

Hot system, with backups, data transferred to new media when it becomes normal seems to be the way to go.

However the ordinary person has no clue about this stuff and regularly loses photos when their phone breaks or they lose their online password or their computer PSU breaks. Most data recovery is easy. Just take the drive out and plug it in a USB port of a working computer. But then you get the iPhone that the USB port is broken and it won't work by WiFi until you have first connected by USB.

Indeed.

Having a server of your own is a good idea. The problem is that it will break at some point. An ordinary person would no know they are a drive down since it would carry on working. They would wait until it's completely busted before calling.

Teaching ordinary people that computers are definitely fallible, will fail and do need care and attention, seems to be a very hard thing. Some people ignore warning lights on car dashboards

 

[Adrian]

This is why FreeNAS has alerts and notifications.

Which may go unnoticed or unread.

Perhaps alerts and notifications should remand some form of human response, and if that does not happen FreeNAS should by default take dramatic "look at me" actions, like slugging performance or failing some file open operations.

 

[Ericloewe]

Which may go unnoticed or unread.

Perhaps alerts and notifications should remand some form of human response, and if that does not happen FreeNAS should by default take dramatic "look at me" actions, like slugging performance or failing some file open operations.

If emails aren't enough, what is? A siren?

 

[Adrian]

If emails aren't enough, what is? A siren?

For some people, a siren might be just the thing (

 

[BarefootWoodworker]

Sometimes people are desperate to get their files back but mostly they seem to know when it's on a computer it can get lost.

The thousands of people I've supported in my relatively short IT career would say otherwise. Computers are magical boxes that never lose information and can be viewed as permanent in their eyes.

The phrase "we do not back up your PC, please copy your important documents to the network" has been stated to users in *every* place I've worked because people are idiots and don't understand computers.