Backup System

[Stupify]

after a lot of consideration i am just going to give up on RAIDZ simply because I can't have the stripping of data failure in any given scenario cause loss of all data. To achieve what i want and to keep things simple and sane i rather just have a disk drive that i dump my backups on and have a weekly scheduled process that copies the backup dumps to another drive. So issues with power outages, disk failures or data loss due to invalidated stripping. Add disk-level encryption on top and done.

this will be done in a computer case and i will just have to make it more inconspicuous to attract attention to it.

 

[c4rp3d13m]

It is not recommended that people use esata or USB for FreeNAS except during initial setup to copy data off of external drives. The issue is that if you have an "accident" and unplug the whole array or several drives are unplugged that share a common power strip you can lose all of your data. The whole premise of FreeNAS and ZFS is reliability. That reliability is compromised significantly if you are using external drives. You're at your own risks/peril if you choose to go that route, and don't say we didn't warn you.

I have 2 of these San Digital (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111177) external cases I used them to backup my files. I now have my FreeNAS 8.3 running with 1 SATA OS + 12 SATA RAIDZ3 hard drives; all of my data are in there happy and alive. I am wondering if I could still use my external cases to backup my production FreeNAS files, that will allow me to store in an offsite storage place. Do I need special app to detect my external drives?