Backup Idea: BTSync + FreeNAS + ZFS

[markpat3rson]

I have 2 Macs in my house that need a good backup strategy. Time Machine is ok but after a while it always stops working for one reason or another and I have to erase the Time Machine drives and start over. Lame. Plus I've heard problems persists with Time Machine on a NAS drive.

I'm thinking about building a FreeNAS system, mainly for the wonderful ZFS snapshot feature. I'll have BTSync installed on the FreeNAS, as well as on the Macs of course.

I'll have both Mac home folders synced to folders on the FreeNAS ZFS filesystem. (Also, i'll be sharing some larger media files from the FreeNAS back to the Macs over AFP that wont be part of the BTSync).

So, the FreeNAS will have a constant 1:1 backup of all my files on the Macs, plus a way of rolling back to earlier / deleted files via ZFS snapshots.

This sounds like a great setup. Maybe too good to be true? Are they any pitfalls I might run into?

Also, does ZFS play nicely with BTSync and vice versa? I've seen a thread over on BT forums about how Zevo, the Mac version of ZFS, causes Mac BTSync to hang. I'm wondering if this is mac specific, or if the same issue exists on the FreeNAS version of BTSync.

Advice? Thoughts?

 

[dlavigne]

Just a heads up that btsync has not been ported to FreeBSD yet: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/PBI_Requests.

 

[markpat3rson]

Oh. Ok thanks. I assume you mean in an easily installable plugin format? Because i've seen many tutorials on how to install it on FreeNAS using the terminal. Such as this http://www.reddit.com/r/LinuxActionShow/comments/1egva8/installing_bit_torrent_sync_on_freenas

Hopefully there's no drawbacks to using the terminal method!

 

[dlavigne]

Yup, you can use the terminal method from a Jail. Hopefully at some point someone will take the port request, make a port, and then a PBI

 

[markpat3rson]

Awesome!

I guess my main worry is would any of the underlying ZFS stuff, like the hidden snapshot folder, be copied back to the Mac by BTSync? I don't want this to happen!

It's been a while since I used a ZFS system, but I seem to remember that the snapshot folder was present at the root level of the vdev? For example, lets say I have a vdev called VIDEOS (which is synced via BTSync), and I mount it's snapshot to retrieve a file, would the snapshot appear at VIDEOS/.snapshot/date-time/? If not, then where does it mount?

And would this cause BTSync to automatically start copying the entire contents of .snapshot back to the Mac?

Forgive my ignorance if i'm completely wrong on this. I hope I am!

If this is the case though, I'd have to set BTSync to ignore the snapshot folder.

 

[dlavigne]

You should be fine as long as you don't manually (at the command line) modify the ZFS 'snapdir' property. The default value ('hidden'), means that the .zfs directory at the root of each dataset (which contains the snapshots directories) will not be exposed to any programs that are traversing your directory structure (ls, find, btsync etc). It is only accessible if you explicitly specify /path/to/dataset/.zfs/snapshots.

 

[survive]

Hi guys,

I'm not sure you even need a port. I grabbed the FreeBSD binary from the BTsync site (it's just one file) and copied it to my filer...it started and appeared to run, but I never actually tried to sync any data with it.

-Will