After A Pool, Then What

[spinnakercc]

This is all new to me and so far what I have read in the documentation, I do not see an answer to my question. I am so used to backing up to directories on removeable drives. Now, Once a pool is made, can I assign different folders in that pool to segregate my backup storages? If so, how do I d that. Can I do it in the Windows interface? Also, how to you locate these directories to send a backup too? Would I map or share each directory? I am a bit confused and sorry if my question sounds stupid.

 

[Heracles]

Hi again Spinnakerc,

The pool itself can be considered as a gigantic virtual drive. Datasets are kind of partitions in that drive. So now that you have your pool, to create yourself a first dataset would be the next step.

As for backups, there are many options...

First is to make sure your FreeNAS itself is robust. A well design server can survive many incident by itself and can recover using local resources like snapshots. Still, the server can not recover from everything (ex: should a fire destroy the server...) and external backups are always important.

So what will you use as a backup solution for your NAS ? Here, my backup is a second FreeNAS server I deployed hundreds of km away from my main server. I use zfs replication to replicate the data to that second server. Should anything goes wrong with the first server, either physical or logical, I have everything in my DR server.

Will you do your backups on magnetic tapes ? On a separate server ? In the cloud ?

Once you chose your backup strategy, then we can see how to put it in place.