A couple of simple questions for a new Truenas user

[Smokie]

Hey everyone,
Thanks for reading and I know what I’m probably asking is very basic and might be out there in the forum but I’m just looking to get some basic direct answers for my first setup to get myself grounded.

I just completed my build and it’s very basic to start off with, I just want to be able to do a few things and do them well to start off with.

I have truenas booting on a 256g ssd and that leaves me 3 sata ports for storage. I only had two 1tb drives to start so there currently running in mirrored. I plan to update the drives as needed to bigger ones and it looks possible by increasing VDev? Is it possible in the future to add a 8tb drive to my spare sata port and use all 8tb? Then I would plan to replace the two 1tb ones with 8tb. Hopefully this makes sense.
I’ve created my pool but haven’t shared anything as yet, and am wondering if I can also have a Mac share from the same pool?
Sorry if it’s a messy post.




ryzen 3
B450 motherboard
16G ddr4 ram
256ssd boot
2x 1tb drives for storage

 

[Spearfoot]

Hey everyone,
Thanks for reading and I know what I’m probably asking is very basic and might be out there in the forum but I’m just looking to get some basic direct answers for my first setup to get myself grounded.

I just completed my build and it’s very basic to start off with, I just want to be able to do a few things and do them well to start off with.

I have truenas booting on a 256g ssd and that leaves me 3 sata ports for storage. I only had two 1tb drives to start so there currently running in mirrored. I plan to update the drives as needed to bigger ones and it looks possible by increasing VDev? Is it possible in the future to add a 8tb drive to my spare sata port and use all 8tb? Then I would plan to replace the two 1tb ones with 8tb. Hopefully this makes sense.
I’ve created my pool but haven’t shared anything as yet, and am wondering if I can also have a Mac share from the same pool?
Sorry if it’s a messy post.




ryzen 3
B450 motherboard
16G ddr4 ram
256ssd boot
2x 1tb drives for storage

In your case it's not a good idea to expand your mirrored pool by adding a single-disk vdev; you'd have a single disk striped against the mirror set and therefore have no redundancy.

You're correct in thinking that you can increase the capacity of your mirrored pool by replacing the smaller disks -- one at at a time -- with larger disks. Once you've replaced both disks, you'll see the increased capacity.

An alternative would be to create a RAIDZ1 array of 3 disks -- your 2 1TB disks and an 8TB disk. ZFS would only use 1TB of the 8TB disk, but once you replace both of the 1TB disks w/ 8TB units, ZFS would expand the pool capacity to 16TB. But note that RAIDZ1 isn't recommended for such large disks because of the risk of pool failure during resilvering.

If you have an available x8 PCIe slot, you could install a relatively cheap LSI HBA, giving your system support for 8 more disks. Then you could expand your pool by adding up to 4 more mirrored pairs.

Good luck!

 

[Smokie]

Thanks for the reply,

I don't need huge amounts of storage starting off so I will go down the route of replacing the 1tb disks at some stage, and If I ever need to increase my storage I can always build another machine.

Can you help me out in regards to setting up shares? Is it possible on my current setup to allow windows machines access and also have a time machine section on the one pool?

 

[Spearfoot]

Thanks for the reply,

I don't need huge amounts of storage starting off so I will go down the route of replacing the 1tb disks at some stage, and If I ever need to increase my storage I can always build another machine.

Can you help me out in regards to setting up shares? Is it possible on my current setup to allow windows machines access and also have a time machine section on the one pool?

Yes, you absolutely can share to Windows and Apple, see:

Sharing |

Sharing

www.truenas.com

 

[Smokie]

One more question you might be able to answer me. I have a 256h ssd and I was thinking of putting it in on my last sata port. Could I set this up as a new pool and just use it as a time machine backup?

thanks

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

You can create single disk pools just fine, although I would not. If you have other means of data protection like another copy - go for it.

 

[NugentS]

Not and use it as a bootpool. And don't be tempted to boot from USB (like I do on my secondary NAS) its highly not-reccomended

 

[Smokie]

Not and use it as a bootpool. And don't be tempted to boot from USB (like I do on my secondary NAS) its highly not-reccomended

“Not and use it as a boot pool” can you elaborate? I boot from another SSD, I installed Truenas on a 256gb ssd. A bit overkill on size I’m thinking as the install would be small? So so much wasted space.

 

[elvisimprsntr]

Have you considered connecting the second 256GB SSD and mirroring your boot pool?

 

[NugentS]

When you install TN it uses the entire disk as its bootpool - you have no choice

I suppose you could hack the partitions around. Some have done that to have a bootpool and a datastore on their large boot disk - its possible but I have never done it

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I suppose you could hack the partitions around. Some have done that to have a bootpool and a datastore on their large boot disk - its possible but I have never done it

It's not that difficult. You need some boot medium, e.g. USB of the desired size (I'd recommend 32G, currently) and then do some gpart and zpool magic.

 

[Smokie]

I don’t think I want to start hacking partitions,
Everything is running great and I have some jails up and running. Every day that passes on this build I realise how bloody great it all is so I don’t want to risk anything at this stage.
I might try looking into backing up things now.

can any of you guys point me in the direction of backing up my build? Maybe I can use the 256gb ssd as an external backup?
In Truenas does backing up backup configs and jails etc? Or at jails backed up separately?

sorry for jumping off topic and I appreciate everyone’s time helping a newbie.
Graham

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

You want a data pool with sufficient redundancy. And the configure snapshot tasks for your jail datasets etc. That way you can rollback any "oopsies" with your installation.

The configuration can be saved to your desktop from the UI.

 

[Smokie]

You want a data pool with sufficient redundancy. And the configure snapshot tasks for your jail datasets etc. That way you can rollback any "oopsies" with your installation.

The configuration can be saved to your desktop from the UI.

ok so backups are done on the same machine? I can’t plug in an external drive and use that?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Not automatically. External drives via USB are not well supported, though @Arwen can probably give you some more information on that if I remember correctly.

You can automatically snapshot and replicate on the local machine and/or to a remote machine as long as the remote machine is running ZFS and can be reached via SSH. This is as far as I am concerned the recommended method and I make intensive use of that feature.

For everything else this depends on your failure scenario. If you have e.g. a RAIDZ2 zpool, your data is pretty safe from any disk failure. It would even survive two disks failing simultaneously. So the most common problem will be users accidentally deleting/changing things they did not intend to. With a couple of weeks of snapshots you can always restore any file from any date in the past as long as the date is in that range.

Now for someone breaking into your home and stealing the entire machine, you need an off site backup, anyway. For that replication tasks exist. They copy existing snapshots with a configurable frequency and retention to a second system.

IMHO you should stop thinking in manual "backup copies" on the file level and start thinking in ZFS/Zpool terms. You want a backup of the state of the pool at date X. Automatically, 24x7.

Did you read the ZFS primer, already?

HTH,
Patrick

 

[Smokie]

Thanks Patrick,
I didn’t read the ZFS primer as yet but I’ll have a look today.
I only had two 1tb drives to start off with so I have them mirrored, I think for the little use my machine will have that might be sufficient for the time been. I plan on increasing the size of the drives but I’m in a little bit of a predicament I think.

I can’t add a 3rd drive to my existing pool without starting fresh, but to do this I would need to off load any files I have and blow up my couple of jails? My machine has 4 sata ports and a m.2 slot. I could start over and move my boot drive to the m.2 and have 4 drives for storage.
Decisions decisions decisions..

more reading I’m guessing

 

[NugentS]

I backup in a few different ways:
1. Export snapshots to a secondary ZFS Server (QNAP running TrueNAS)
2. Do a file backup to a local Synology using Synologies Active Backup
3. Backup the VM's using Synology Active Backup to a different Synology NAS
4. Copy the truly important data to Backblaze from the TrueNAS Server. Note that this fits inside the 10GB free tier from Backblaze - so is zero cost (I think I owe them £0.01 at the moment

I did work out how to get duplicati to work in a jail on TrueNAS as a push backup - it took some effort - but I moved away from that after Active Backup worked

 

[Evertb1]

As a rule I never consider redundancy as a backup.

I have used an OpenMediaVault server as an RSync target for backup purposes when I did not had the budget to build a second FreeNAS machine. Worked perfectly fine. In fact before that I had a of the shelf NAS for backup that also was not doing bad with RSync. Only the initial backup took ages on that one.

Replicating is my preferred backup method as well but there are other ways.

For my off-site backup I use cloud storage. I have 5 TB which is enough at the moment as I do only critical files and I secretly hope I will never have the need for it to restore my data because it will take forever.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

As a rule I never consider redundancy as a backup.

Well, the redundant pool with snapshots sure is the backup for the data I have on my Mac. As I wrote it is all part of the use case.

 

[Arwen]

@Smokie - You can use a USB, (or eSATA), attached external disk for backups. I do so and it works fine. I even wrote a Resource on how I do it. It's just an example, every person has different requirements. Here it is;

How to: Backup to local disks

Caveats:

• The intent is to backup, then remove. Permanently attached USB storage is not as reliable as it should be.
• TrueNAS Core really only supports ZFS, even on an external drives. TrueNAS Scale might be different, but that is Beta software at present.
• It is desirable to know enough of ZFS to take that backup disk to another computer and get data off. If your only other computers can't read an external disk formatted to ZFS, then it is a less useful backup method.
• Many external enclosures are not designed with ZFS in mind. They may not come with adequate cooling, even leave off a fan. So, when ZFS wants to scrub your backup disk, the backup disk gets HOT. Perhaps too hot.