Reliability and Data Recovery

[Keith Pratola]

I built a FreeNAS for home use. Primarily a VMware lab and will also be using CIFS to store about 3 TB of files. I am paranoid about data loss and have files going back to '97. I probably don't need to keep all those files, but hey, I like to hold on to stuff. I will be adding more to Dropbox, but my primary storage has also been some type of RAID setup in my house. With Windows I was never too worried since it was NTFS and if something happened to the OS partition, my data was still fine. I am not overly familiar with FreeBSD and how to still access my data if the OS becomes corrupt.

Recently at work we had FreeNAS installed on some older, not so great hardware, and it crashed. This was a VMware environment and everything was stored in a File extent and mounted via iSCSI. After the crash, I was never able to get FreeNAS to fully boot correctly and could no longer access or VMs or data. I plan on setting my FreeNAS up the same way for using iSCSI in addition to setting up CIFS for access in Windows.

I see many people install FreeNAS on a USB drive and have done the same, although I may switch to SSD. Two main questions are, with good hardware is there much risk of FreeNAS crashing? The other question, if something happens to the drive the OS is installed on, how easy is it to restore the configuration if you need to reinstall FreeNAS?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

with good hardware is there much risk of FreeNAS crashing?

With proper care and feeding, pretty low, but non-zero, so no excuse for not having backups of what you care about.

if something happens to the drive the OS is installed on, how easy is it to restore the configuration if you need to reinstall FreeNAS?

Very easy.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Running for 2 years with zero crashes. If it does you just reinstall to new USB stick and upload configuration file. Could be done in 10min.

 

[joeschmuck]

with good hardware is there much risk of FreeNAS crashing?

I like the way you stated it "with good hardware" and there is much less of a risk if you use good and properly sized and configured hardware and there is a possibility of a bug in the FreeNAS software (especially an early release), however lets be honest here, most people are the demons causing their own crashes or complete data destruction. FreeNAS was never intended for the novice although the GUI has improved drastically since version 8.0x, but it's not as intuitive nor forgiving as many consumer grade NAS products.

The USB drive vs. SSD is really a user choice. As far as reliability of the USB or SSD, it depends on if you buy crap or good stuff. I have a very good USB Flash drive, it's old as dirt which is probably why it still works great, built very well and durable. I will switch over to SSD when I change out my WD Red hard drives but not before then because I need a SATA port that I don't have available right now.

SSD as a boot device is in general more reliable and the main benefit is significantly faster software upgrade times. Booting isn't much faster due to the current method in use. Also I wouldn't mirror a SSD boot drive, well I don't' mirror my USB boot drive either, I think it's a waste of time and money but we all have our own opinions.

Always keep a backup of your current FreeNAS configuration file. This will make restoration of a failed/corrupt boot device a quick thing.

And I've had my NAS up and running without issue (well I was doing a lot of development testing so lets not count that) for the better part of 3 years. I upgrade the software about 1 month after it's been released (I play with the new releases in a VM) to ensure any bugs are addressed that may impact me, I end up rebooting my system more than I'd really want to but sometimes I will test out a problem someone has and the VM platform doesn't cut it so I end up rebooting everything, and I shut my system off for a good dusting maybe 3 times a year. So my opinion is that FreeNAS on good hardware (BTW my hardware is frowned upon but I was a tight for money and I took a gamble) in the right hands will be very stable.