Backup Options

[Andrew V]

Hi.

I'm building a personal freenas server. One of the things I have to concern myself with is backups. ZFS snapshots seem like an acceptable substitute for nightlies and can cover the whole system, but I don't want to rely on them alone.

Every drive in this server is hot-swappable. I would like to designate one bay as the "backup bay" and back up important data regularly to the drive in that bay. Then, once a month or so, I want to swap this drive with another in my fire safe. Not quite as good as an offsite copy, but good enough for me.

I've considered ZFS replication, but as far as I can tell it replicates entire volumes. That doesn't suit because (other than snapshots) I only want to back up a subset of files. (say ~500GB of an 8TB array) They won't all be on the same volume or in the same directory sub tree, either.

I'm not finished building the server yet (still waiting on the last couple parts) so I won't be implementing anything right away; I just want to get an idea of what my options are.

 

[danb35]

I've considered ZFS replication, but as far as I can tell it replicates entire volumes.

You need to do a bit more reading on replication, then. It works on the snapshot level, which in turn works on the dataset level. Create a dataset for the stuff you want to back up, set up snapshots of that dataset, and replicate those snapshots.

 

[joeschmuck]

I think you need to understand the limitations of snapshots because they are not a backup.

As for using a separate drive to place your data on which can be your backup, the problem you will have is you cannot just swap it out. You need to understand how to remove a pool from the system and then add a pool back. It's not hard but it's not simply swapping out a drive either.