From reading all the Googled threads on this topic, I feel like I'm going to get a pile of abuse for this post... but stick with me.
Backing up to an external USB drive directly from the FreeNAS host hardware is a sought after feature and a real use-case for home users. It has two advantages:
1) it is a backup, and if the sh*t hits the fan in your main Zpool any backup is better than no backup
2) it is easily man-portable and can be swapped in and out to store off-site or quickly grabbed in the case of a disaster.
The typical community response at this point is that plugging USB drives into FreeNAS should be avoided and you should do the backup from a client PC on the network. Fine, but some people don't have PCs always-on in their house, or perhaps their only PC is the laptop that they occasionally need to take out of the house yet still want backups to continue. For whatever reason, lets keep the faith that as many threads suggest, backing up to a locally attached USB drive is actually a sought after feature for home users no matter how unsuitable it might be for enterprise level deployments.
So the next, often touted, issue is that supposedly ZFS over USB is baaaaaaaaad. Though even the experts don't seem to agree on exactly why this is. However the argument that ZFS is not particularly compatible with any subsequent data recovery use-case (reading the files on your Windows laptop for example) is compelling enough to rule out ZFS as the file-system of choice for this purpose. In any case, it probably makes more sense in a home-brew one-shot backup solution to have the backup on a different file-system to avoid a fs level corruption ruining everything.
So, the feature request is now getting narrowed down. Can we backup to a non-ZFS, locally attached USB device?
Most people now seem to turn to ext3/4, the Linux-Lover's fs of choice. There is a lot of commentary out there from FreeNAS ultras about why ext is baaaaaaaaad. However the simple fact that modern ext4 is not supported on the FreeNAS FreeBSD current kernel is enough to rule this out too.
What's left? Is there a file system that FreeNAS/BSD can mount, is generally considered to be 'okay' for use on USB drives and readable by most consumer OSes?
Ruling out NTFS for Linux/BSD write compatibility and FAT32 for the file-size limits, it would appear to leave one contender... exFAT.
Supported natively in Windows and MacOS, supported in Linux with exfat-fuse and supporting in FreeBSD with fusefs-exfat.
So, the ultimate ask:
Is it possible to configure FreeNAS, somehow, to mount an exFAT formatted USB drive and create an Rsync type cron backup for:
a) an entire pool
b) an entire dataset
c) specific paths in a dataset
Thanks for reading, I hope this turns into a useful discussion.
Backing up to an external USB drive directly from the FreeNAS host hardware is a sought after feature and a real use-case for home users. It has two advantages:
1) it is a backup, and if the sh*t hits the fan in your main Zpool any backup is better than no backup
2) it is easily man-portable and can be swapped in and out to store off-site or quickly grabbed in the case of a disaster.
The typical community response at this point is that plugging USB drives into FreeNAS should be avoided and you should do the backup from a client PC on the network. Fine, but some people don't have PCs always-on in their house, or perhaps their only PC is the laptop that they occasionally need to take out of the house yet still want backups to continue. For whatever reason, lets keep the faith that as many threads suggest, backing up to a locally attached USB drive is actually a sought after feature for home users no matter how unsuitable it might be for enterprise level deployments.
So the next, often touted, issue is that supposedly ZFS over USB is baaaaaaaaad. Though even the experts don't seem to agree on exactly why this is. However the argument that ZFS is not particularly compatible with any subsequent data recovery use-case (reading the files on your Windows laptop for example) is compelling enough to rule out ZFS as the file-system of choice for this purpose. In any case, it probably makes more sense in a home-brew one-shot backup solution to have the backup on a different file-system to avoid a fs level corruption ruining everything.
So, the feature request is now getting narrowed down. Can we backup to a non-ZFS, locally attached USB device?
Most people now seem to turn to ext3/4, the Linux-Lover's fs of choice. There is a lot of commentary out there from FreeNAS ultras about why ext is baaaaaaaaad. However the simple fact that modern ext4 is not supported on the FreeNAS FreeBSD current kernel is enough to rule this out too.
What's left? Is there a file system that FreeNAS/BSD can mount, is generally considered to be 'okay' for use on USB drives and readable by most consumer OSes?
Ruling out NTFS for Linux/BSD write compatibility and FAT32 for the file-size limits, it would appear to leave one contender... exFAT.
Supported natively in Windows and MacOS, supported in Linux with exfat-fuse and supporting in FreeBSD with fusefs-exfat.
So, the ultimate ask:
Is it possible to configure FreeNAS, somehow, to mount an exFAT formatted USB drive and create an Rsync type cron backup for:
a) an entire pool
b) an entire dataset
c) specific paths in a dataset
Thanks for reading, I hope this turns into a useful discussion.
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