Hi all. I'm currently planning on moving to FreeNAS to consolidate my home network, and I'm excited about the flexibility and features of the FreeNAS environment. However, there's one sticking point which might be a "showstopper", and I'm hoping someone can point me in the direction of a solution.
I'll try and state things as concisely as possible. I plan to consolidate my home server machine (a Windows 8.1 box with some Windows only applications and a couple of mixed Windows/Linux VMs) and some functionality of my desktop (Windows VMs) into a single FreeNAS machine. On the server, I currently have my CrashPlan cloud backup account, which is doing the offsite backup needs of my BBU-backed hardware RAID6 main storage (which I would move to a RAID-Z2 on FreeNAS). If I move to FreeNAS, I'd like to be able to run a Windows 8.1 VM which would emulate the current server machine (including the Windows applications and my CrashPlan account, doing cloud backup of my shared storage from FreeNAS). I've been using CrashPlan for over 4 years now, and I really want to keep my device history after the transition (i.e. I don't want to start the cloud backups from scratch on a new installation).
I've found a couple of guides here which use Linux (running in a VM/jail on FreeNAS) to perform this CrashPlan backup role (e.g. [HOW TO] FN11: Migrate to CrashPlan 6.6 w/o losing your jail backups), but nothing so far with a Windows VM. I know that backing up a network share from a Windows machine is an 'unsupported feature' of CrashPlan, but it's one which is quite widely used from what I understand, so I hope (*fingers crossed*) they won't remove that feature in the future too (don't get me started on the problems with Code42's management and restrictions of CrashPlan historically).
TL;DR: I'm wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a text or video tutorial/how-to which would be relevant to getting a Windows VM running on FreeNAS with a network share which is backed up to CrashPlan and keeps my backup/device history from a previous Windows machine.
Thanks for any help or advice.
I'll try and state things as concisely as possible. I plan to consolidate my home server machine (a Windows 8.1 box with some Windows only applications and a couple of mixed Windows/Linux VMs) and some functionality of my desktop (Windows VMs) into a single FreeNAS machine. On the server, I currently have my CrashPlan cloud backup account, which is doing the offsite backup needs of my BBU-backed hardware RAID6 main storage (which I would move to a RAID-Z2 on FreeNAS). If I move to FreeNAS, I'd like to be able to run a Windows 8.1 VM which would emulate the current server machine (including the Windows applications and my CrashPlan account, doing cloud backup of my shared storage from FreeNAS). I've been using CrashPlan for over 4 years now, and I really want to keep my device history after the transition (i.e. I don't want to start the cloud backups from scratch on a new installation).
I've found a couple of guides here which use Linux (running in a VM/jail on FreeNAS) to perform this CrashPlan backup role (e.g. [HOW TO] FN11: Migrate to CrashPlan 6.6 w/o losing your jail backups), but nothing so far with a Windows VM. I know that backing up a network share from a Windows machine is an 'unsupported feature' of CrashPlan, but it's one which is quite widely used from what I understand, so I hope (*fingers crossed*) they won't remove that feature in the future too (don't get me started on the problems with Code42's management and restrictions of CrashPlan historically).
TL;DR: I'm wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a text or video tutorial/how-to which would be relevant to getting a Windows VM running on FreeNAS with a network share which is backed up to CrashPlan and keeps my backup/device history from a previous Windows machine.
Thanks for any help or advice.
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