Disaster Recovery

[pachterb]

My first home server was build on Windows Home Server. My system included hot swap trays for syncing data to removable drives. These drives were removed and inserted into water tight containers and put into a fire proof safe. As a retired IT disaster recovery professional I considered this approach reasonable protection for my data. About three weeks ago I installed (3) new 4TB WD Red disks for my disk array and installed FreeNAS 11.2. My new FreeNAS server is working well and the learning curve has not been difficult. Thanks to the development team for all their hard work!

Then came time to implement my Disaster Recovery plan. The hot swap disks work well and FreeNAS recognizes them. But, I cannot mount a non-ZFS file system. That is a deal breaker! I have spent over a week scouring the internet for a solution but find no solution. In some of the discussions it is apparent the FreeNAS development team is adamant non-ZFS file systems will not be mountable.

Please help me understand the plan.

Thank you,
Patrick...

 

[danb35]

But, I cannot mount a non-ZFS file system. That is a deal breaker!

If it's a non-negotiable requirement that you be able to regularly work with directly-attached non-ZFS disks, then FreeNAS is probably not the OS for you. It can be done, but it will be hack-ish and a maintenance nightmare.

Or you can format those disks as ZFS.

 

[pachterb]

danb35,

Thank you for your reply. I have considered mounting the removable drives ZFS but in the event the server is lost I would not be able to access the data until I built a new server. Any suggestions on how to read ZFS from windows? I did a little research on mounting ZFS on windows but did not find anything that looked hopeful.

I built a task that uses mount_smbfs and rsync to another nas drive. This works, but consider the load on the Ethernet controller and lan vs using sata or pci on the server.

Your thoughts?

 

[Redcoat]

Dual boot your windows machine with a Linux version that runs ZFS?

I don't know status of this development, but https://github.com/openzfsonwindows Maybe someone else here does know where it stands

 

[Arwen]

@pachterb, I too am a computer professional and have plenty of experience with both backups and disasters. In my case, I format my FreeNAS backup disks as ZFS single disk pools. This allows me to verify the backup disk before I write the new backup. Plus, on the 8TB disk, I can keep multiple copies of my backups using snapshots. If I used UFS, (the other main option for FreeNAS), I could do neither.

The method is described here in the forums, under the Resource tab. This is a link;

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/how-to-backup-to-local-disks.26/
It's not a HowTo guide, as there are too many variables that people need for their FreeNAS install. But, it clarifies some of the details of how to perform local disk backups on FreeNAS.

As for disaster recovery, you can boot a Antergos Linux Live ISO, (or possibly Ubuntu), which has built in support for ZFS.

 

[danb35]

in the event the server is lost I would not be able to access the data until I built a new server.

How long does it take to install FreeNAS to a USB stick or small SSD?

Any suggestions on how to read ZFS from windows?

Yeah, use pretty much any OS but Windows. I'm not really trying to be a smartass here, it just happens to be the case. Work is progressing to port ZFS to Windows, but for now you'd need to use just about anything else. Linux will do ZFS. So will FreeBSD. Or MacOS. Or Illumos.

 

[RegularJoe]

you can mirror your boot volume, you can make a backup copy of your config, you can replicate your zfs pool somewhere else and if you want to you can use Bacula to backup to and then a Bacula copy job to your removable drive.