The point of this post is to ask other people using their FreeNAS box for housing backups what their strategy is. Also, to get some feedback on my own personal back up strategy, outlined below.
So to get the discussion going, my backup philosophy/strategy follows:
My FreeNAS box is my primary backup strategy. I don't use it as a file share or for doing anything more than being there to receive my backups. My secondary is an external drive I plan to reconfigure (as soon as I get the data on it backed up) to receive ZFS snapshot backups. In case of fire, I grab the external drive, my cat, and get out.
I generally dislike Apple, but if there's one thing I admire from them, it's their Time Machine back up software. I am finding it difficult to find a good alternative that works for Windows (and Linux to a lesser extent) without spending a bunch of money trying out different products.
Currently, I am using this script (running in cygwin on windows) to back up my linux and windows boxes:
https://github.com/Mondane/timebackup
It's a shell script that sort of emulates the style of backup that time machine does.
Basically, it uses hardlinks to save space from copying files that are unchanged. I find it to be nifty. It uses rsync, which makes it slow. But I can browse the file history and access a file at any point in history.
But now I know that FreeNAS (with ZFS) has these newfangled "snapshots", which could offer similar functionality with a much simpler script (e.g. copy files to FreeNAS, take snapshot, copy files to same location, take snapshot, etc. Only the differences between snapshots will take up space AFAI understand). So maybe that would be a simpler backup strategy that utilizes the strengths of the underlying system. What makes or breaks it is how easy it is to access older versions of files.
I also recently learned about "Backup PC" ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ) and might be interested in making a FreeNAS plugin for that if it suits my needs better than the above two systems. It seems more complicated, and might not run simply on my windows box without extra effort.
It also looks like it requires you to use it to restore backups; with my current system, I can just go to a SMB share and grab my backups, and I assume using ZFS snapshots is a little more involved, but about as easy.
So to get the discussion going, my backup philosophy/strategy follows:
My FreeNAS box is my primary backup strategy. I don't use it as a file share or for doing anything more than being there to receive my backups. My secondary is an external drive I plan to reconfigure (as soon as I get the data on it backed up) to receive ZFS snapshot backups. In case of fire, I grab the external drive, my cat, and get out.
I generally dislike Apple, but if there's one thing I admire from them, it's their Time Machine back up software. I am finding it difficult to find a good alternative that works for Windows (and Linux to a lesser extent) without spending a bunch of money trying out different products.
Currently, I am using this script (running in cygwin on windows) to back up my linux and windows boxes:
https://github.com/Mondane/timebackup
It's a shell script that sort of emulates the style of backup that time machine does.
Basically, it uses hardlinks to save space from copying files that are unchanged. I find it to be nifty. It uses rsync, which makes it slow. But I can browse the file history and access a file at any point in history.
But now I know that FreeNAS (with ZFS) has these newfangled "snapshots", which could offer similar functionality with a much simpler script (e.g. copy files to FreeNAS, take snapshot, copy files to same location, take snapshot, etc. Only the differences between snapshots will take up space AFAI understand). So maybe that would be a simpler backup strategy that utilizes the strengths of the underlying system. What makes or breaks it is how easy it is to access older versions of files.
I also recently learned about "Backup PC" ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ) and might be interested in making a FreeNAS plugin for that if it suits my needs better than the above two systems. It seems more complicated, and might not run simply on my windows box without extra effort.
It also looks like it requires you to use it to restore backups; with my current system, I can just go to a SMB share and grab my backups, and I assume using ZFS snapshots is a little more involved, but about as easy.