Crazy thought - please read before launching the flames :-)

[Bryan Everly]

Hi all,

I have recently built a really nice FreeNAS for my home setup using a Supermicro atom motherboard and a really nice 4 hot swap bay chassis with Western Digital reds and dual SSD mirrored boot volume. It's working great and I've stood up a couple of services in jails and all is working well.

As I think about backup, I'd like to have something offsite that I zfs send to but would literally do nothing other than be a dumb sync target for my data. Am I crazy to think about using a raspberry pi running FreeBSD plugged into like a 5TB external USB drive? I could do the initial replication on my LAN and then plug it into a friend's house to receive the deltas.

I know that ZFS likes RAM and the performance would stink (USB2 as well on the rpi) but just as a place to dump stuff in case my house burns down - could it do it?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

 

[Dice]

What makes you think the hardware recommendations do not apply to "dumb sync target" offsite backups?

 

[Bryan Everly]

What makes you think the hardware recommendations do not apply to "dumb sync target" offsite backups?

IDK. Hope? Frugality? ;-)

 

[Pitfrr]

I think it all depends on how much you value your data, isn't it? ;-)

My personal thoughts on that would be that for a secondary backup solution why not "experiment" with some solution that might be unorthodox (referring to HW recommendations).
But as a primary backup solution I would consider it to be too risky...

 

[depasseg]

I thought about this too, but I don't think that FreeNAS will even run on a RPi. I thought it was a different architecture.

 

[Ericloewe]

I thought about this too, but I don't think that FreeNAS will even run on a RPi. I thought it was a different architecture.

FreeNAS isn't compiled for ARM, but vanilla FreeBSD is. Dunno what state of usability it's in, I've only used FreeBSD-based stuff on x86.

 

[Jon M]

There's a really thorough write-up on doing exactly that here: https://github.com/hughobrien/zfs-remote-mirror

 

[wblock]

FreeBSD support of the various ARM systems varies. The Pi is more of a hardware experimenter system than a practical small system. Having the ports all around the outside can result in a mess of wires. And of course there is the very limited amount of system RAM. A netbook is a lot more viable, might be capable of meeting the memory requirements for ZFS, and has a built-in screen and keyboard.

 

[Chris Moore]

I don't know what kind of budget you have, but you could probably find a very cheap used server on eBay that would have all the FreeNAS hardware requirements covered and still only cost a little more than a raspberry pi. For example:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...229878?hash=item3d2c2e3176:g:~~QAAOSwM4xXaG5h

This system is old but it has two bays where you could even put in a mirrored pair of drives plus it is actual server grade hardware.

It might not earn you as many cool points...

The only bad part might be the heat and noise but it would be at your friend's house, so it is still a win.

 

[Stux]

This system is old but it has two bays where you could even put in a mirrored pair of drives plus it is actual server grade hardware.

I dunno, I reckon that'd earn some cool points ;)