Data Safety Recommendations & More

[aardvark]

Hello TrueNAS community,

Newbie to TrueNAS, in the past have run raspberry pis (arm-debian) or ubuntu under ESXi as my home servers. Turned my old gaming pc parts into a TrueNAS for some of that sweet sweet ZFS. Liking things so far, just have a couple questions.

Main server right now has a single 256GB M.2 drive as the boot-disk, 240GB SanDisk SSD plus for VMs and Services, and 3x Refurb Seagate Exos X14 10GB Drives mirrored as main NAS. I will eventually add another single large SSD for a network share Steam library. Is this setup sub-optimal? Is my main storage at risk if the boot drive or the services drive were to fail? Should I mirror one (or both) of those as well, or can I simply back them up (somewhere else) and be safe?

System is currently an i7-7700k in a Z270-A Pro, 32GB RAM

Also I'd like to aggregate my logs eventually with Graylog, likely ran on a VM, which would be on the SanDisk SSD. Will the constant IO pummel that drive? If so, what's the best solution there?

Feel free to answer any or all or none of my questions!

 

[Arwen]

Old gaming PC parts generally make a poor, (for the long term), TrueNAS server. Make sure you disable all over-clocking, (CPU & RAM), plus, some power saving options in the BIOS can make a TrueNAS server un-reliable.

The boot disk does not have to be a faster 256GB M.2 device. If that M.2 is NVMe, then it's better used for the VMs and Services. You can then use the 240GB SanDisk SSD as the boot device.

A 3 way Mirror of Refurb Seagate Exos X14 10GB Drives is a reasonable choice for data safety.

A single large SSD for for a Steam library can work. Not common to have un-protected pools, but possible.


Just keep in mind, good backups of your VM & Services, plus your single large SSD for Steam are desirable if you ever loose either SSD. Or even just blocks of those SSDs. Without any redundancy, you risk data loss on SSD failure.

Don't know about the logs question.


On the reason why we recommend disabling over-clocking, is that a TrueNAS server can be busy for days at a time during a largish pool scrub or disk replacement. The I/O system will hammer the memory & possibly the CPU, creating a risk of bit flips and excessive heat. While some gaming PCs seem to be fine for hours of game play with over-clocking, ZFS scrubs are recommended for twice a month or so. Those can take a long time to finish, meaning more than a single day, depending on the amount of data to be scrubbed. Thus, outside of the normal gaming PC use of a few hours that use over-clocking.

 

[aardvark]

Thank you for your input, Evenstar. Great info.

The idea for the Steam library SSD lacking redundancy is that I can easily reinstall the games over the internet from Steam should that drive fail, just as if it were a single drive connected to my actual desktop, just networked. Movie/TV library & personal data will reside on the mirrored pool, as that would be much harder to rebuild from scratch than the downloaded games.

I was thinking I wanted the m.2 to be boot-disk for faster boots, but you're right, since TrueNAS will mostly be on all the time, those speeds won't really be necessary. So I'll likely switch to a small regular SSD for boot-drive. Although I'm not overclocking, I was considering picking up an x99 platform board in the future so I could do dual cpu / way more RAM since TrueNAS seems hungry for it, and selling my old gaming rig as a gaming rig.

My most important question though is still: Do I need to back up / mirror my boot-drive in order to protect the 3x10 mirror pool? Like if my boot-drive dies, would I be able to set up a fresh TrueNAS and just move my 3x10TB Seagates over to that and 'import' them or something, or is there data on the boot-disk that describes the data on the main pool, that would otherwise be unrecoverable if that m.2 boot-disk fails?

 

[ChrisRJ]

My most important question though is still: Do I need to back up / mirror my boot-drive in order to protect the 3x10 mirror pool? Like if my boot-drive dies, would I be able to set up a fresh TrueNAS and just move my 3x10TB Seagates over to that and 'import' them or something, or is there data on the boot-disk that describes the data on the main pool, that would otherwise be unrecoverable if that m.2 boot-disk fails?

In general you can simply import the pool on a new system. Exceptions may come into play when the pool is encrypted (at least that was the case in the past). In the latter case you would need to have a backup of the encryption key.

 

[aardvark]

That is excellent to know ChrisRJ. I guess I'll get the chance to test it out, as I'll probably freshly install TrueNAS when I switch boot-disks, instead of just cloning my current one.

I don't really plan to implement drive encryption, the purpose of which I'm guessing is to privatize your data in the event someone has physical access to the drives. Is there any other benefit I'm unaware of?

 

[Arwen]

Also, plan on backing up your system configuration after any configuration change. Or before any planned shutdown or hardware change. There is even a script hanging around here in the forums or resources to automatically backup your system configuration to a local pool. Not as convenient during recovery, but far, far easier to have the most up to date system configuration.

Doing so will allow you to return your TrueNAS server to exactly where it was, at the time of the system configuration backup. And it WILL know your pool, and what shares are on it. No need to manually import your pool. Of course, any pool data is not touched, so it will have any data written at the time of the boot disk failure.

So no real need to mirror the boot disk. (Unless you want to, just to avoid the downtime.)

As @ChrisRJ said, you can manually re-import a pool if you absolutely need to do so. As long as you use the same or later version of ZFS, (on FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS or even MS-Windows), ZFS is portable. This is why in some cases a ZFS expert will build a ZFS pool with a specific feature set, and leave the latest features disabled.


In regards to encryption. Their are 2 main reasons:

• When sending a disk back for warranty replacement, you don't have to worry about personal data leaking to the vendor
• In case of theft, any thief that does not have the encryption password or passphrase, can't access your data

ZFS native encryption has the benefit that you can encrypt a single dataset, (aka file system), and leave others without encryption. Thus, if you want to store your scanned receipts or tax filings, you put them in the encrypted dataset. But, no need to encrypt your Movie/TV library.