nickt
Contributor
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2015
- Messages
- 131
Hi,
Still progressing through my new FreeNAS build, and trying to finalise my backup strategy. My basic plan is to backup to a pair of external backup drives (USB): one will be connected to my FreeNAS and the other will be stored at an offsite location, rotating every fortnight / month. While not essential, I'd really like to be able to read the backup drive on a low end Windows machine at the offsite location (my office).
My first thought was to format the backup drives as ZFS and use snapshots / replication with periodic scrubs scheduled. That would surely be the most robust backup strategy, but all options for reading the offsite drive on my Windows machine seem problematic one way or the other. I could:
The other option is to use Crashplan / rsync to an NTFS formatted drive, but I don't think NTFS support in FreeNAS is present and / or encouraged. Crashplan seems to have its own scrubbing methodology, which is nice, but the NTFS support is a concern.
Any suggestions? I assume rotating external USB drives in the way I have described is a fairly typical backup strategy for home NAS use cases, so I am keen to understand how others do it.
Many thanks.
Still progressing through my new FreeNAS build, and trying to finalise my backup strategy. My basic plan is to backup to a pair of external backup drives (USB): one will be connected to my FreeNAS and the other will be stored at an offsite location, rotating every fortnight / month. While not essential, I'd really like to be able to read the backup drive on a low end Windows machine at the offsite location (my office).
My first thought was to format the backup drives as ZFS and use snapshots / replication with periodic scrubs scheduled. That would surely be the most robust backup strategy, but all options for reading the offsite drive on my Windows machine seem problematic one way or the other. I could:
- Use zfs-win to provide ZFS capability to Windows, but this looks ancient and forgotten
- Build a VirtualBox based FreeNAS VM on my Windows machine, but I only have 3 GB of useable RAM in total
- Build a VirtualBox based Ubuntu VM on my Windows machine and use one of the Ubuntu ZFS solutions
The other option is to use Crashplan / rsync to an NTFS formatted drive, but I don't think NTFS support in FreeNAS is present and / or encouraged. Crashplan seems to have its own scrubbing methodology, which is nice, but the NTFS support is a concern.
Any suggestions? I assume rotating external USB drives in the way I have described is a fairly typical backup strategy for home NAS use cases, so I am keen to understand how others do it.
Many thanks.