Hello everyone

[mortein]

I am from South Africa, and very new to this sort of thing. I am self taught and consider myself as an average user. So I can get around fairly easy, however since discovering FreeNAS, I have found it be in a different ball-park... therefore wayy out of my average user ability.

So now you can help me and put me in the right direction.


Mortein

 

[DifferentStrokes]

Welcome! I hope you enjoy your stay.

 

[mortein]

Welcome! I hope you enjoy your stay.

I certainly hope so. Tx for the welcome

 

[cyberjock]

FreeNAS is pretty advanced. If you are willing to learn, there's lots of info around the forum. You just have to find it, read it, and understand it. A good starting place is my noobie guide (link is in my sig). Our forum stickies are definitely good to read. I will warn you that this won't come overnight. It will take time and effort (and hopefully no data loss if you do your homework). At first you are going to feel overwhelmed. It's like sipping from a firehose. Just give it time to sink in. Play with FreeNAS in a VM or on test hardware if you have to before actually buying your final FreeNAS box.

FreeNAS isn't for everyone either. My mom has no chance of ever understanding FreeNAS, even if her life depended on it. Lots of people try FreeNAS and go back to sticking to what they know. There's no shame in that. But ZFS is pretty awesome and FreeNAS is probably the easiest way you're going to be able to enjoy ZFS without paying some ZFS admin to maintain your server. ;)

 

[BigDave]

In the beginning I started with some old hardware and as Cyberjock suggested above, played with it.
After several weeks of hanging out in the forum and reading 'til my eyes bled (just kidding), I was hooked.
Leaving my Windows "comfort zone" was hard, but this is a hobby for me, so the education is very enjoyable.
Welcome!

 

[joeschmuck]

It is much easier than it looks. The thing to grasp is how ZFS defines it's RAID like options and knowing ahead of time these two things:
1) How do I replace a failed drive.
2) How do I increase storage capacity.

These may sound simple but they are the majority of user problems with respect to data loss.

The last thing is to actually read the user manual and play around with it for a month, reformatting drives, messing with different setups, etc... And as long as you have a backup of your important data elsewhere, if you screw it up then you are okay. Once you are done learning then set it up and forget it.