Complete begginer asking for guidance

[Martin Medina]

so i have very important data that i need to have safely stored, is not much though like 30 gb of data (mostly personal pictures and videos and some very important documents), so today i found 3 old hdd that i had, and also an old computer to play with (athlon 64 and 4 gb of ram), so since i don't need performance i'm thinking of a raid 1 configurations BUT the 3 drives i have are different sizes, the smaller one being 320gb, i think is possible to have storage redundancy with different size drives the thing is that i don't trust these drives because they have all failed in the past, they are working properly now but god knows if they are going to fail in the future so i want to have the same data copied in all 3 drives because the chance to lose all 3 drives at the same time i think it's very unlikely, i think i'll have the data in the nas as well as in an external drive just to test this.

so please can you lead me to some tutorial to help me configure things up like i need to

 

[Jailer]

so i have very important data that i need to have safely stored

This

so today i found 3 old hdd that i had, and also an old computer to play with (athlon 64 and 4 gb of ram)

And this are completely in conflict. If you value your data stop right now and get some appropriate hardware.

 

[Arwen]

FreeNAS and ZFS are about data integrity. Using left over hard disk drives and an old computer
are not the way to get data integrity.

Further, 8GB of RAM is the minimum. Perfectly fine for trival uses. Using less than 8GBs of RAM
is just asking for problems.

Another way to go, is to not use FreeNAS. Instead, use FreeBSD or Linux with ZFS on the data
disks, as individual pools. That way you can perform a ZFS scrub on the disks, and have some
confidence that the data is still safe. Make one the master, (probably the smallest), and use all
the others backups. This would be all manual and you may not have the skill set to do it, but it's
one way to deal with less than ideal hardware.

 

[melloa]

Don't do it. Find another system with at least 8 GB RAM and get new disks. You can start with small disks and replace with bigger ones if needed. eBay is full of pull outs that are not too expensive and will be a better choice.

 

[DrKK]

Well in fairness,

The OP can get a decent file storage solution with this old stuff. Just not with FreeNAS.

Sir, if your goal is to repurpose old/crappy hardware, then might I suggest you look at the less hardcore options, such as unraid, or even "Turnkey Linux File Server".

Or, just buy an external hard drive, or two, since your needs appears to be so modest.

 

[Martin Medina]

Today i built the pc with the spare parts and windows 7 i created a shared folder and i'm syncing files from android to pc with an app called syncme and in windows i'm doing real time copies of the files to other 3 hdd including one external usb drive, this mirroring is triggered whenever a change is made on the shared folder so i have 4 different drives with the same data, further more i isolated the pc from transit and it doesn't have a mouse nor a keyboard nor a monitor so it is only connected to my router and the electricity. To get into the GUI and manage files i'm doing it through chrome remote desktop, please tell me this setup is decently safe even though the hard drives are old ones, i'm willing to closely monitor the pc state just to be sure everything is ok, all in all this setup acomplishes what i need, which is redundancy of storage, but there are a couple of things i don't like about this setup so please if you can help me with these "issues" it wil be much appreciated

firsly i can't sync my files if i'm not connected to the same network, so is there a way to sync my files to this pc from anywhere in the world?

Secondly the syncs with Syncme can't be triggered whenever i take a new photo or download a file to my phone, they can only be scheduled or made manually so it would be ideal for the sync to be triggered whenever i add a file to the sinced folders on my phone.

please tell me the most likely ways this setup can fail and leave me with no data.

How can i test losing my main shared folder in the main drive to see if the foldes in the other drives maintain the data integrity?

 

[Stux]

With 3 drives you could run a 3 way mirror. You should still have a backup. And the machine with 4GB is not up to running FreeNAS.

One of the concerns you should have right now is that if you delete a file, it corrupts, or you get a crypto locker virus, what is going to stop the problem relocating to your backups?

 

[Martin Medina]

thanks stux i'am indeed running a 3 way mirror with a program called mirrorfolder so each time a change is made in the main shared folder it replicates in the other 2 folders located in 2 different drives, so for example if i take a new pictures with my android phone and sync it to windows with Syncme the file is copied in real time to other 2 drives.

about the virus concern i was thinking about blocking internet access to the pc so it would only have access to the local network because i think it doesn't need access to the internet, but i don't know how to do this. one of the concerns is if i block internet access will i still be able to access remotely to the pc with chrome remote desktop?

i'm guessing that if i delete a file by accident i can restore it, and if i delete and empty the recycle bin the file is mostly dead unless i disconnect the drive immediately and run a data recovery software,

about data corruption i don't know what could i do to avoid it, i guess using new good drives would be the answer, i'm willing to put money on this build in the future to have safer storage using good hard disk drives

 

[Stux]

Running a server with ZFS + Snapshots + 3-way mirror would be a good solution. You just can't do it with FreeNAS on your Athlon64 with 4GB.