Suggestion for small system for offsite backup

[nschafler]

I have been running a FreeNas at my office as a primary file server for years, with replication every 10 minutes to a second onsite FreeNas as backup, as well as nightly replication to BackBlaze. For a number of reasons (mostly cost and control), I'd like to migrate my offsite backups to a FreeNas box in my home. For storage requirements 4TB is more than enough (office only produces PDF's and Word documents, the entirety of my company's 13 year history is currently less then 2TB). The box will be used for nothing except a nightly replication of the on-site storage pool.

I would appreciate hardware suggestions.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

I'd like to migrate my offsite backups to a FreeNas box in my home.

a FreeNas at my office as a primary file server for years, with replication every 10 minutes to a second onsite FreeNas as backup

Don't you already have an onsite backup?

Keep in mind that if you get rid of your offsite backup and anything catastrophic happens to your house such as fire or flood you could lose all of your onsite machines and lose everything.

My approach to offsites is to rotate hard drives out of my onsite FreeNAS backup ever few weeks or so or whenever I introduce important data to my system. If you do get rid of your BackBlaze you may consider doing something like this so you have at least some data offsite.

 

[nschafler]

Thanks for reading. Yes I already have an onsite backup (main FreeNas box to second FreeNas box). I'm not looking to get rid of offsite backup, rather, I would like to change my offsite target from Backblaze to a third FreeNas box.

As you rightly point out it is good practice to have both onsite and offsite backups. The onsite backup is there for machine failure of the primary, and the offsite backup is in case of catastrophe.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Ah, I misunderstood. So if you're just asking about offsite backups I'd suggest you go with something fairly moderate. Unless for some reason you have an insane upload from your house and download at your offsite there isn't any reason to go beyond a board with a 1G NIC. In general I'd suggest you go on the lerss expensive end in terms of hardware if it is just a backup and thus doesn't have to be super performance. For example, my backup is an X9 series supermicro board with 8GB ECC ram and a modest processor. Once you pick out your basic specs from there you just gotta pick a place to put it and select a case. For the case I'd go with whatever is cheap and satisfies the noise and space constraints of where it will live.

I would not sacrifice things like ECC memory, 8GB ram, etc for the reason that if your house suffers a catastrophe this may be the only system that you can use to recover your data. As such, you'll want to be sure it was able to perform its job of safely receiving and storing your data.

One feature you may find nice is hot swap bays. My backup has them and I love it because I use it to burn in new disks etc and rotate disks without having to shut the machine down.