I'm planning on building a FreeNAS server for my home that will have one pool of mirror vdevs. Initially, the pool will consist of 4 drives of 6TB each (2 mirror vdevs), so 12TB usable data. It will grow in the future. I'll probably add another mirror vdev to the pool when I run out of space.
My question is: How can I back up the entire 12TB to external hard drives?
Here's what I'm thinking would be best. Correct me if any of this doesn't seem right, because I am a newbie at this. This is going to be my first FreeNAS build...
What I'm thinking of doing is buying two external esata hard drive enclosures (JBOD). Each enclosure would be used to connect directly with and backup the FreeNAS machine. Each enclosure would contain a ZFS filesystem, so that I can use scrub and ZFS replication. I would connect them, perform the backup, and then disconnect them and take them off-site.
Each esata enclosure would contain exactly the same number of terabytes as the main FreeNAS system. So if my FreeNAS system had 12TB of usable hard drive space, then the backup esata enclosure would contain 12TB of usable hard drive space also. That way, I don't have the issue of having to manually split up my data onto more than one hard drive individually.
So the plan would be: I plug in the first enclosure, backup everything to it, disconnect it, and then take that enclosure off-site (to my work office). Then a week later, I run another backup using the second esata enclosure that's at home still. Then I take that 2nd enclosure to my office (off-site). And when I return home, I take the first esata enclosure back home with me. This cycle repeats once a week or so. One enclosure stays at home, while the other is off-site, and I rotate them. I can maybe even leave the esata enclosure plugged into the main FreeNAS machine all the time while it's at home, receiving regular backup snapshots in real-time.
Does this sound reasonable? Do esata enclosures work with FreeNAS? Do they work well? I guess it just depends if your motherboard has an esata port on it?
I'm not sure how ZFS replication would work in this case, or if I'd need to use rsync or something instead. I think I'd prefer using ZFS snapshots.
This should make recovery easy. If I lose my pool, I could replace the drives in my main FreeNAS box and then copy from one of the esata enclosures to my FreeNAS box. In the worst case scenario, I lose a week of data, which is acceptable.
I considered backing it up using individual USB attached hard drives, but people generally say that that ZFS isn't reliable with USB attached hard drives.
Also, using single hard drives (as opposed to some kind of JBOD enclosure which contained multiple hard drives) means that I would have to manually split up my backup. In other words, if I want to back up 12TB, I can't use a single, 6TB hard drive to do that. Even if it was possible with compression, my pool could grow eventually to 24TB. I just don't see a way forward with individual external hard drives. I'd much rather use a RAID enclosure with esata.
What do you think? Is that something people do? If not, what's a better way? Are there any technical issues that I'm not seeing which will make this not work like I want it to?
Using Crashplan or some off-site backup service seems wrong for this purpose. It's too much data. Ends up costing money. And I'd rather not use them as my main backup method. Though, I might use Crashplan to backup really important parts of my data like my pictures and home videos.
Thanks for the help.
My question is: How can I back up the entire 12TB to external hard drives?
Here's what I'm thinking would be best. Correct me if any of this doesn't seem right, because I am a newbie at this. This is going to be my first FreeNAS build...
What I'm thinking of doing is buying two external esata hard drive enclosures (JBOD). Each enclosure would be used to connect directly with and backup the FreeNAS machine. Each enclosure would contain a ZFS filesystem, so that I can use scrub and ZFS replication. I would connect them, perform the backup, and then disconnect them and take them off-site.
Each esata enclosure would contain exactly the same number of terabytes as the main FreeNAS system. So if my FreeNAS system had 12TB of usable hard drive space, then the backup esata enclosure would contain 12TB of usable hard drive space also. That way, I don't have the issue of having to manually split up my data onto more than one hard drive individually.
So the plan would be: I plug in the first enclosure, backup everything to it, disconnect it, and then take that enclosure off-site (to my work office). Then a week later, I run another backup using the second esata enclosure that's at home still. Then I take that 2nd enclosure to my office (off-site). And when I return home, I take the first esata enclosure back home with me. This cycle repeats once a week or so. One enclosure stays at home, while the other is off-site, and I rotate them. I can maybe even leave the esata enclosure plugged into the main FreeNAS machine all the time while it's at home, receiving regular backup snapshots in real-time.
Does this sound reasonable? Do esata enclosures work with FreeNAS? Do they work well? I guess it just depends if your motherboard has an esata port on it?
I'm not sure how ZFS replication would work in this case, or if I'd need to use rsync or something instead. I think I'd prefer using ZFS snapshots.
This should make recovery easy. If I lose my pool, I could replace the drives in my main FreeNAS box and then copy from one of the esata enclosures to my FreeNAS box. In the worst case scenario, I lose a week of data, which is acceptable.
I considered backing it up using individual USB attached hard drives, but people generally say that that ZFS isn't reliable with USB attached hard drives.
Also, using single hard drives (as opposed to some kind of JBOD enclosure which contained multiple hard drives) means that I would have to manually split up my backup. In other words, if I want to back up 12TB, I can't use a single, 6TB hard drive to do that. Even if it was possible with compression, my pool could grow eventually to 24TB. I just don't see a way forward with individual external hard drives. I'd much rather use a RAID enclosure with esata.
What do you think? Is that something people do? If not, what's a better way? Are there any technical issues that I'm not seeing which will make this not work like I want it to?
Using Crashplan or some off-site backup service seems wrong for this purpose. It's too much data. Ends up costing money. And I'd rather not use them as my main backup method. Though, I might use Crashplan to backup really important parts of my data like my pictures and home videos.
Thanks for the help.