FreeNAS Backup and Storing Data

[Fish10800]

Hi Guys,

I am new to FreeNAS and I have been reading a lot of forum posts over the last few days trying to find answers to my questions before I ask in a post and I have learned a lot. I plan on using my Dell Poweredge T300 for a FreeNAS server for some home user features.

I intend to setup a basic Windows Share to backup all my pictures, music, and other files from Windows to FreeNAS. I would also like to experiment with Owncloud and MineOS plugins as well as some of the other plugins.

Here is where my question comes into place, I am an IT consultant and I am used to doing things on the Windows side. I know things will be different with FreeNAS as I have read many times. Can someone confirm for me the way to backup my data if it is stored on FreeNAS. What I am used to seeing is having a server and backing up all that data to either a NAS or external USB drives using software. Then rotating out the drives so you always have a current backup and store a weeks worth of backups.

If I use FreeNAS as a backup source for my PC that would be fine because I have the files stored on my PC and I am backing them up to another location. In the event of a PC crash or FreeNAS crash all my files would be in two locations, My PC and FreeNAS. Now, if I start storing data only on my FreeNAS server how does that get backed up? I read that USB devices are not recommended and I read that you can setup CrashPlan to backup you data to the cloud. I am not a fan of cloud based backups so is there an option to backup all data stored on FreeNAS to external drive or local USB drive somehow? Or, is that not a recommended solution? Is CrashPlan my only option?

If not, then how would you backup your data if you were going to use FreeNAS to setup your own cloud, FTP server, or media server and store the files on the FreeNAS drives? I realize there are snapshot options with FreeNAS but unless you move them to an external source if FreeNAS fails you loose the snapshots as well.

If something like this has been answered and I missed it on the forum please point me in the right direction and I apologize.

Also I have FreeNAS setup with two spare 500GB hard drives I had extra in a mirrored array. I am just testing with this and trying to familiarize myself with FreeNAS while I deiced what drives to buy for my server.

 

[nick779]

Hi Guys,

I am new to FreeNAS and I have been reading a lot of forum posts over the last few days trying to find answers to my questions before I ask in a post and I have learned a lot. I plan on using my Dell Poweredge T300 for a FreeNAS server for some home user features.

I intend to setup a basic Windows Share to backup all my pictures, music, and other files from Windows to FreeNAS. I would also like to experiment with Owncloud and MineOS plugins as well as some of the other plugins.

Here is where my question comes into place, I am an IT consultant and I am used to doing things on the Windows side. I know things will be different with FreeNAS as I have read many times. Can someone confirm for me the way to backup my data if it is stored on FreeNAS. What I am used to seeing is having a server and backing up all that data to either a NAS or external USB drives using software. Then rotating out the drives so you always have a current backup and store a weeks worth of backups.

If I use FreeNAS as a backup source for my PC that would be fine because I have the files stored on my PC and I am backing them up to another location. In the event of a PC crash or FreeNAS crash all my files would be in two locations, My PC and FreeNAS. Now, if I start storing data only on my FreeNAS server how does that get backed up? I read that USB devices are not recommended and I read that you can setup CrashPlan to backup you data to the cloud. I am not a fan of cloud based backups so is there an option to backup all data stored on FreeNAS to external drive or local USB drive somehow? Or, is that not a recommended solution? Is CrashPlan my only option?

If not, then how would you backup your data if you were going to use FreeNAS to setup your own cloud, FTP server, or media server and store the files on the FreeNAS drives? I realize there are snapshot options with FreeNAS but unless you move them to an external source if FreeNAS fails you loose the snapshots as well.

If something like this has been answered and I missed it on the forum please point me in the right direction and I apologize.

Also I have FreeNAS setup with two spare 500GB hard drives I had extra in a mirrored array. I am just testing with this and trying to familiarize myself with FreeNAS while I deiced what drives to buy for my server.

I have a 2 step backup. I have a freenas box, full server build thats in my sig. My grab and go backup is a dell precision laptop with 8gb of ram and a mirrored 2 disk 2TB pool. Every night my Main box replicates any new changes to the pool to the precision.

It works for me because I have shares and everything configured on my backupNAS. All I have to do is give it a network connection and turn on CIFS and bam instant server backup.

Other people have configured offsite backups, and IIRC 9.3 supports backing up to Amazon's S3 storage services so theres another option.
I dont think you can do tape backups though.

 

[Fish10800]

Thanks for the reply, yeah it seems like a lot of people are setting up another FreeNAS machine just to backup to. I am understanding you correctly right, you use FreeNAS on the laptop?

 

[nick779]

Thanks for the reply, yeah it seems like a lot of people are setting up another FreeNAS machine just to backup to. I am understanding you correctly right, you use FreeNAS on the laptop?

Yes sir. It may not be recommended, but the model I came across had no driver issues, no performance issues, nothing. My only gripe is that it didn't have ecc memory.

 

[Glorious1]

Like you, we back up our computers to the FreeNAS regularly, and I don't see any need to back up the backups.

But as you say, anything else should have a backup plan, even if you have redundancy in your pool. What I do is not exactly a "best practice", but I have two pools in my FreeNAS server. One is the workhorse, the other is backup. Once a day the working pool replicates a new snapshot to the backup pool. You do this by using 'localhost' to identify the "remote" server.

I know, if my FreeNAS catches fire, if the power supply fries all the drives, it's stolen, or someone takes a sledge hammer to it, I've lost it all. But the more likely problems are a pool getting irretrievably broken, or user error resulting in files getting deleted, and this guards against that.

 

[Robert Smith]

FreeNAS is a virus, LOL. It breeds more FreeNASes.

While it is possible to import/export pools attached, for backup purposes, through ESATA, for example; the way it stands now, it is not very convenient.

 

[sef]

I've used multiple mechanisms to back up:

1. Add another disk to the mirror, resilver it, and detach it when done. Place disk in offsite location. (Downside: this doesn't work if you're using non-mirrored disks in your pool.)
2. Add an external drive to the system, create a zpool out of it, and copy the pool I wish to back up to it. (Using snapshots and incremental backups, I can continue to use this periodically.) The disk goes offsite as desired. I could use multiple disks for this. (Downside: usb drives generally suck, and it's difficult -- but not impossible -- to do this in a redundant way. Also, you need disks at least as large as the space consumed by your pool.)
3. A variant on the above, I actually dumped the zfs zend to a non-ZFS filesystem file. (That is, "zfs send > /mnt/Backup/`date +%Y%m%d`.zfs" or similar.) This also works over the network. (Downside: you have to trust the filesystem.)
4. Using some python and shell code, back up to AWS. (This also uses snapshots to only do incrementals.) (Downside: it's very slow, and those AWS charges do add up.)

For some reason, (4) doesn't like one of my pools, so I'm currently only doing (2). I hope to change this to be more comprehensive with future FreeNAS releases and features.

One of the nicest things about ZFS is that, due to snapshots being built in, it's easy to mix as desired, and have redundant backups.

Now if only I could find a disk degausser cheap...