Another Kiwi from New Zealand flying FreeNAS

[drhitchcock]

Hey FreeNASians,

After recommendations from a couple very smart people I've decided to install FreeNAS on my what was my Steam Box, then Linux Desktop. With all the ransonware guff going down and my lady's phone almost dying I thought it would be a good idea to centralise my backups and media storage. I've got various Raspberry Pi solutions wired around the house ;D

So I'm trying to setup a FreeNAS instance for the following purposes:

• Some kind of backup for my KDE Neon (Ubuntu) laptop, this is currently using deja-dup to backup to a Pi on the network with an external USB HD.
  
• Time Machine backups for a couple macOS laptops.
• Syncthing server.
• Potentially backing iPhone and Android to the NAS directly.
• Music server for a large collection of unsorted songs.
  
• Video server for a large collection of unsorted videos.

Here are the hardware specs for what I've currently got in the box:

• Motherboard: MSI H81I
• CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G3220 @ 3.00GHz
  
• Ram: 16GB
• Storage: WD Blue 500GB (2+ years old) and WD Red 2TB (new)
• Boot: Mirrored Kingston 32 GB USB3 flash drives

Apart from the videos I'd like everything else to have some recovery from HD failure. My original thoughts would be that all the videos would go on the 500GB Blue, everything else on the 2TB Red, and then when I get more cash I'd get a second 2TB Red to mirror the existing one.

The lappy with Deja Dup will just see it as a networked drive via SSH so no biggie there. The Time Machine stuff I'll need to do a bit of research on. There's already a Syncthing plugin so no dramas there. Backing up phones directly might be stretch.

What are peoples recommendations on how to manage the HDDs? Do I stripe the Blue and make the Red part of a RAIDZ?

Does this sound like a plan? Any advice?

Peace,
Dr H.

 

[danb35]

The Time Machine stuff I'll need to do a bit of research on.

Pretty straightforward, just check the box for Time Machine: http://doc.freenas.org/11/sharing.html#apple-afp-shares