Suggestions for cheap ~8TB NAS backup solution?

[JKman]

i got my nas box going now looking into backup options.
i have done a little research and am now totally confused. ZFS replication, rsync, crashplan. so many options. that's all great but guess i'm stuck and looking for some community suggestions.

my ~8TB raidZ1 freeNAS is essentially my media server plus 2 users home drives. it is only about 35% full atm, but want a future proof backup solution.

crashplan seems cool but backup up over 3TB over the internet don't seem too smart.
ZFS replication would mean i need a second freenas box somewhere.
so rsync seems like the only viable option for me.

any suggestions on the least expensive way hardware wise to set it up?

 

[joelmusicman]

I went with Crashplan myself, but you're right that it is pretty slow. I actually have a really fast internet connection (100mbit down and up), but Crashplan runs dedup and compression (yes, even on movies that are already compressed!) locally on a single-threaded app, which limits the speeds to about 7mbit/s. My 4.5TB will take over 2 months to finish replicating. I'm hoping that if I ever need to recover it will be a lot faster downloading. $60/year is a lot better deal than building out a whole second server though.

It's also got me wondering if I should upgrade my G3220 to a Xeon...

 

[JKman]

yes, i think if i do crashplan i would just backup personal files only. maybe my music too. ignore all the video files stuff.

at the moment, i am mulling over this:
http://www.terra-master.com/en/Products/professional/soho-tank/11841527329308.html?sub=2

if i went with this, i would hook it up to my raspberry pi and do figure out how to do rsync. they also have a NAS model that looks the same, but my computer vendor doesn't offer that one yet (maybe it's too new).

 

[joelmusicman]

Just a thought, it's pretty easy to select what gets backed up from the Crashplan desktop client. So if I did it again, I'd start by just selecting the important stuff first, then once that gets replicated add the music, then the videos, etc. until everything is done. Once it all replicates there shouldn't be a whole lot of change...

 

[leenux_tux]

JKman,

You could (if you have enough free SATA ports) add more drives to your existing system, create a backup pool and backup to that, or, another option would be an external hard drive connected to a laptop/desktop system. I know at first it might sound a tad crazy, and it depends upon how much data you need to backup (plus expected growth) but I have been doing it for a number of years now and it works very well, especially now I have a USB3 drive and a e-sata drive I can use.

The most painful part is doing the first backup, it takes HOURS to run. Using rsync or robocopy (windows) enables you to restart the backup and it will pick up where it finished, which is really useful. In my case the e-sata drive is used as an archive. I backup to it every month or so. The USB3 drive I backup to every week. My data is fairly static so I can afford to do the backup's that way. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

EDIT
At the end of the day the most important thing is that your data IS backed up somewhere, plus, and this is VERY important, you are 100% confident that in the event of a catastrophic failure, you can get your data back.

 

[joelmusicman]

I've thought about the fact that a lot of us on the forum get really hung up about transfer speed, but really it doesn't matter. Even USB2 drives are fine for backup because it really doesn't matter how long it takes. Just set it to start before you leave for work or before you go to bed and let it run...

 

[cyberjock]

Except that USB drives, when they start having problems, even a few sectors, tends to make restoring your data damn hard if not impossible. The reason being that when your typical USB drive starts having problems and ends up in error recovery mode the USB communication will almost certainly timeout. Once it times out, the drive is disconnected from the system.

Later, when the disk comes out of error recovery mode, the drive will be made available to the system again, and you will again be able to import it.

But, can you imagine trying to do imports for every little thing when a disk starts failing and you *really* want the data on the disk?

We've had users do it.. and some got literally only table scraps back from their drive.

USB is just not meant for reliability in any way, shape, or form.