Backup FreeNAS on off-site old laptop just in case.

[seby20]

Hi, first off, I'm new to all of this. I'm not a network guy at all. So please be gentle ;) .
Ok, I have already a FreeNAS setup as movies, photos, video, souvenirs for our family.
I have look to back up everything on cloud, but too complicated for me and don't have the money for it.

So I have an old laptop here that "maybe" I thought I could use to backup the FreeNAS once a week but off-site. So I have an external USB 10TB that could be plugged to it. So I could bring that laptop at my friend's house and wired to the internet to copy once a week my FreeNAS. Or actually, what is new.

Is this possible first?
If yes, could you help me on that?
tks
Seby

 

[Samuel Tai]

Is this possible first?

Yes, but what you propose is pretty slow. Better would be something like this:

How to: Backup to local disks

How to: Backups to local disks Overview: This subject comes up often enough that I thought I would start a post of how I do it. Specifically I back up my TrueNAS to a hot-inserted, locally attached disk, then when done, hot-remove and take...

www.ixsystems.com

And then just store the drive at your friend's place. Visit weekly to refresh the backup.

 

[seby20]

Yes, but what you propose is pretty slow. Better would be something like this:

How to: Backup to local disks

How to: Backups to local disks Overview: This subject comes up often enough that I thought I would start a post of how I do it. Specifically I back up my TrueNAS to a hot-inserted, locally attached disk, then when done, hot-remove and take...

www.ixsystems.com

And then just store the drive at your friend's place. Visit weekly to refresh the backup.

Hi, tks for your answer, what is slow? I mean, let's say I make my first initial backup like you sent me on an external HDD. Then I plug it on the laptop I was talking about. Lets say I add 3 movies during the week. so 12gb for instance. Then during a night, it will upload only those 3 movies on the backup place. You think it's not good enough?

tks
Seby

 

[Heracles]

Or actually, what is new.

Is this possible first?

Hi,

It is surely possible. I would suggest you establish a VPN between your friend's network and yours as a first step. You can do it site-to-site between your routers if they offer it, or client-to-site with a VPN client installed on the laptop.

Before deploying the laptop at your friend's place, do the first sync on your local network. It will me million time faster. You can use RSYNC for that.

Once done, keep doing the RSYNC but over the VPN. RSync can synchronize only the difference between the two. Be sure not to sync the deletion if you want to be able to recover from an accidental deletion. Also, be aware of propagating damaged data like ones that would have been encrypted by a ransomware.

The ideal would be to do ZFS Send - Receive. That way, the snapshots will keep the deleted data or the unencrypted versions in case of a ransomware attack.

 

[seby20]

Hi,

It is surely possible. I would suggest you establish a VPN between your friend's network and yours as a first step. You can do it site-to-site between your routers if they offer it, or client-to-site with a VPN client installed on the laptop.

Before deploying the laptop at your friend's place, do the first sync on your local network. It will me million time faster. You can use RSYNC for that.

Once done, keep doing the RSYNC but over the VPN. RSync can synchronize only the difference between the two. Be sure not to sync the deletion if you want to be able to recover from an accidental deletion. Also, be aware of propagating damaged data like ones that would have been encrypted by a ransomware.

The ideal would be to do ZFS Send - Receive. That way, the snapshots will keep the deleted data or the unencrypted versions in case of a ransomware attack.

Ok, I understand the concept. Now, like I said lol, I'm really a newbie. I don't know if it would be possible somehow for you to help me set all that up. Meaning from the laptop. Maybe I could use linux, I don't know, because it's an old laptop. So from there, I'm really lost. I really need , if possible, a step by step guide.
I could hire you also if you want and learn at the same time.
thanks for your help
Seby

 

[seby20]

anyone please?
tks
Seby

 

[seby20]

Like I said, I'm pretty noob in this networking-server stuff, I really need help from you guys.
tks in advance
Seby

 

[Heracles]

To setup a VPN is highly dependent of the technology you choose to use for it. Will you go IPSec ? OpenVPN ? Just SSH tunneling ? There is a limit to what we can tell you and do. If all of these technologies are too obscure for you, better not to use them in a production environment.

The easiest to do would be SSH tunneling, authenticated with public keys.
The easiest VPN to configure would be OpenVPN.

There are more options... Up to you to pick your path here.

Also, most of these infrastructure access will have to be build using something else than FreeNAS. So should you need support, you may have to ask somewhere else (like in a forum for pfSense if you go that way).

 

[NasKar]

I experimented with a site to site VPN after @Heracles gave me the idea of using an old dd-wrt router and PfSense router. My pfsense is the VPN server and ddwrt is the remote client. It allows the 2 sites to connect to each other securely. It may not be easy to setup if your new to it. Swapping out the remote HDD would be the easiest and least expensive. I think you would have to swap your router with openvpn with the one your friend probably got from his ISP. That could create issues for your friend if he has a problem and the router is not supported by his ISP.

 

[seby20]

ok, my god I did not understand anything lol. So I guess it's not for me...

 

[subhuman]

ok, my god I did not understand anything lol. So I guess it's not for me...

Sure at this point you have a few options. Either what you just said: give up when confronted with something new. Or learn.
Your choice.

 

[seby20]

Yes. I wanna learn, I just need a precise guide about it if possible.
Does anyone can guide me or help me understand preciseley?
tks
Seby

 

[Samuel Tai]

A fairly painless way to start learning networking is via the Khan Academy's YouTube series on networking 101.

 

[seby20]

A fairly painless way to start learning networking is via the Khan Academy's YouTube series on networking 101.

For what I need to do, will I learn on how to accomplish exactly what I need there?
tks
Seby

 

[subhuman]

It's a step. Will you learn exactly what you need? Probably not, but it moves you closer to that goal.
You could google some of the terms used right before you said you were lost. Terms like VPN, SSH, dd-wrt and pfsense, but if you have no understanding of networking, the search results will probably not make sense to you.

 

[elorimer]

I'll come out to play. I fear this is getting too sophisticated too fast, and neglects the power of FreeNAS: spin up a new server and import a pool.

First, the OP needs to have a backup. All we know is he has stuff on a FreeNAS server and we don't know anything about that server and its data integrity setup. He has two classes of data: movies; and photos, videos and souvenirs. We don't know how much is in those classes, but he has a 10TB USB drive. It's stupid to do a cloud backup of movies, but not so stupid to think about the photos, videos and souvenirs. We don't know how much he has of those, but backing that up to Google Drive or something else might very well be feasible. Backing up movies, meh.

Let's ignore that we don't know anything about the integrity of the data on the primary server. Which would be the second thing to focus on, since that is the most likely failure point.

So plan A could be to backup everything to the USB drive (never mind the laptop). Then backup the photos, videos and souvenirs to the cloud (or some subset). That could all be mostly real time, and the movies are vulnerable to the primary physical location (fire, flood, theft, earthquake).

Now, how really correlated is the "friend" to fire and flood? Next door? How far? The weakest part of the design problem is the internet path between those two locations, and we don't know the upload/download of those either.

 

[seby20]

I'll come out to play. I fear this is getting too sophisticated too fast, and neglects the power of FreeNAS: spin up a new server and import a pool.

First, the OP needs to have a backup. All we know is he has stuff on a FreeNAS server and we don't know anything about that server and its data integrity setup. He has two classes of data: movies; and photos, videos and souvenirs. We don't know how much is in those classes, but he has a 10TB USB drive. It's stupid to do a cloud backup of movies, but not so stupid to think about the photos, videos and souvenirs. We don't know how much he has of those, but backing that up to Google Drive or something else might very well be feasible. Backing up movies, meh.

Let's ignore that we don't know anything about the integrity of the data on the primary server. Which would be the second thing to focus on, since that is the most likely failure point.

So plan A could be to backup everything to the USB drive (never mind the laptop). Then backup the photos, videos and souvenirs to the cloud (or some subset). That could all be mostly real time, and the movies are vulnerable to the primary physical location (fire, flood, theft, earthquake).

Now, how really correlated is the "friend" to fire and flood? Next door? How far? The weakest part of the design problem is the internet path between those two locations, and we don't know the upload/download of those either.

Hi, tks for the answer. I did not create that FreeNas, so can you tell me how can I tell you what is the integrity setup? What information you need?
I've attached 2 files to show you some information, but don't really know what you need.
As for the movies backup, you are right that it's little stupid to back up them, but re-downloading them all, is also very long lol.
The idea to have an automatic process to backup outside of my home was to save on cloud services. Cause I don't have money for that and I have a laptop doing nothing. So I thought it could be a good idea to have that as an emergency, just in case the Freenas failed or fire or else....

tks for your help
Seby

 

[elorimer]

Looks like a nice system. You have five disks in two pools, one being a single disk Movie pool with about 2TB of data (only half the disk), and the other being a four disk pool of unknown size (at least 8TB) with an unknown amount of data and an unknown setup. Then you have that 10tb USB drive.

The Movie pool has no redundancy: if that disk fails, all of the data is gone. I'm guessing it is one dataset. The Seby pool we can't tell. If it is 4 2TB drives in a stripe, then that pool is vulnerable to any one disk failing and all the data is gone; it may be organized as mirrored drives or as Z1 or Z2, in which case it might survive the failure of one or more disks. It probably has several datasets with different amounts of data.

So the first consideration is having at least one backup of those datasets. You might back up all of them to the USB drive, or you might back up the dataset(s) on one pool to the other pool. Or both. You have plenty of room on Seby to back up all of Movies, but we don't know the other way.

The second consideration is to keep the backups current with an appropriate snapshot and replication structure.

The third consideration is the one in your OP, offsite backups. It may be that some of the datasets in the Seby pool lend themselves to online free storage, like Google Drive or OneDrive. It may be that the photos are already backed up on Google Photos. And it may be that the totality of the datasets in the Seby pool wouldn't be that expensive to have in the cloud (like $1 or $2 a month). In which case you would be done without having to bother your friend. Knowing how that Seby pool is set up would help (under the Storage tab).

 

[seby20]

Looks like a nice system. You have five disks in two pools, one being a single disk Movie pool with about 2TB of data (only half the disk), and the other being a four disk pool of unknown size (at least 8TB) with an unknown amount of data and an unknown setup. Then you have that 10tb USB drive.

The Movie pool has no redundancy: if that disk fails, all of the data is gone. I'm guessing it is one dataset. The Seby pool we can't tell. If it is 4 2TB drives in a stripe, then that pool is vulnerable to any one disk failing and all the data is gone; it may be organized as mirrored drives or as Z1 or Z2, in which case it might survive the failure of one or more disks. It probably has several datasets with different amounts of data.

So the first consideration is having at least one backup of those datasets. You might back up all of them to the USB drive, or you might back up the dataset(s) on one pool to the other pool. Or both. You have plenty of room on Seby to back up all of Movies, but we don't know the other way.

The second consideration is to keep the backups current with an appropriate snapshot and replication structure.

The third consideration is the one in your OP, offsite backups. It may be that some of the datasets in the Seby pool lend themselves to online free storage, like Google Drive or OneDrive. It may be that the photos are already backed up on Google Photos. And it may be that the totality of the datasets in the Seby pool wouldn't be that expensive to have in the cloud (like $1 or $2 a month). In which case you would be done without having to bother your friend. Knowing how that Seby pool is set up would help (under the Storage tab).

Tks again, here's another screenshot from Storage Tab
Seby

 

[seby20]

So I guess there's no tutorial on the subject lol. So probably a bad idea.
tks
Seby