FreeNAS secondary/tertiary Backups

[skyline65]

I have 4X2tb drives which I want to use as secondary or tertiary backup drives. They will backups of files that reside on my Freenas server, my Mac or both. Im also making BD Mdisc copies as well. I was just going to copy data to a disk then box them up, however if I want to add data it would mean unboxing attaching to my Mac etc etc. However I have a spare N54 Microserver and was wondering whether I could just use Freenas to setup each individual disk as its own Zpool. I know there is no fault tolerance... but these are backups and would most proably only be turned once every few months to add more data. Would there be a problem with this or is there a better solution?

and Merry Christmas:)

 

[tvsjr]

You probably wouldn't set them up as separate pools. Create one pool and stripe across multiple drives. Obviously, as you've already pointed out, you have no redundancy... one drive fails and the whole pool is toast. A smarter idea would be RAIDZ1... give yourself a bit of fault tolerance at the cost of one drive. Then, do ZFS replication to back up the data.

 

[Chris Moore]

I know there is no fault tolerance... but these are backups and would most proably only be turned once every few months to add more data. Would there be a problem with this or is there a better solution?

Like @tjsvr said, if they are all the same size, may as well give yourself a little safety net and use RAID-z1. I have a backup pool of 5 x 5TB drives that I update once a week. It has been working great for over a year now. However, I just setup an rsync task to copy any changes from the main pool on Sunday at Midnight. ZFS send (using replication) might be faster though.