Questions about FreeNAS

[idunham]

Hey all,

I've been looking at freeNAS and see that it is a very powerful/versatile software, however i have a few questions:

Currently i run a backup service where businesses backup to a NAS in their office and that NAS backs up to my NAS in my office. Both of those NAS's are currently Iomega ix2-200 cloud editions. One feature that i really like about iomega products is they have the cloud option. So it is simple and easy to take the iomega and back them up to each other. Is there a way i can put FreeNAS at my location and have those iomega's back up, incrementally, to the freeNAS box?

How easy/difficult is it for freeNAS to have remote access? Remote access would means Users could login and see their data, and only their data no one elses (i'm assuming a lot of that is done based on permissions.) The biggest question is simplicity, though.

Would i be able to setup remote rsync with FreeNAS? So users wouldn't have to have a NAS at their location, files would just be backed up from there computer directly to the Freenas at my office.

How easy is it to expand storage?

Is round robin NAS an option with Freenas. That way if, for whatever reason, my NAS would go down then they could still backup to another NAS i have at another location?

Thanks!
Isaiah

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

this would be very easy to setup with one freenas box at their offices and one at yours. you just need to setup ssh keys on their boxes so you could pull their data daily. You would use rsync to move incremental data and would probably want to save each clients data to a different dataset. you could then snapshot these datasets at both location so you could revert back to any data in the past even if they deleted it.
-I do this with my webserver / minecraft server data to have incremental backups to an offsite server

Remote access could be setup with ftp, i haven't played with it in freenas but it is a complete system that definily made for a situation with different users access different data with different permissions. You could make easy for them, I just have't played with freenas' implementation of ftp so I don't know how easy it is to setup.

expanding storage is done by upgrading all disks in a vdev to a larger size, or adding more vdevs to a zpool. you could also add zpools which could keep redundancy maximized.

not sure about round robin setup over wan but I know it could be done, not sure if this would be easy to setup in freenas.

 

[idunham]

Is there anyway to make my current Iomega's work with FreeNAS? In short, i'm looking for a robust/expandable solution for the server at my office. The Iomega, on my end, has me pretty limited. I'd like to keep the current Iomega's at their respective locations, though.