Hi. My name is Jon and I live in North Carolina.
I am likely in way over my head but I've gotta start somewhere, right? After using a few external drives for backing up I decided I needed a better approach. I wanted something that kept everything backed up automatically, provided mirroring, and was always available. I looked at a few of the store bought solutions but found they were all lacking in one way or another and were expensive given their capacities and limitations. Somewhere along my journey I stumbled upon FreeNAS. I bought an older HP tower with a quad-core i7 processor, 16GB RAM and room for 4 drives. Put two new 3TB drives and two older 1TB drives in it and set then followed the tutorials to get FreeNAS up and running. After some minor issues I have had it running in a mirrored setup for over 3+ months. I am using it to back up my computer, my wife's computer, backup photos (photography is a hobby of ours so there are a lot of large resolution RAW files), and a general 'server' partition.
I am not a computer guy. I understand the hardware and what it does for the most part. At least at a high level. But software and programming is my biggest weakness. I know that my system design is marginal at best. I will likely work to upgrade it over the next year. And I will likely be reaching out for some help as I encounter problems or find myself confused on how to proceed.
My most recent problem is that the power was knocked out yesterday for a few hours when no one was home. The system went down. When I tried to reboot it it has stopped at the "Beginning ZFS volume imports". It was like this overnight. I rebooted it again and the same thing. I have seen looking over the interwebs that if there is any issues with one of the drives that it could take several hours to days to finish. True? I did see that it should not be rebooted soon after deleting large amounts of data. I cleared out a largish
amount (maybe 400-500 MB) of computer backups last week but it was over 5 days before the crash.
Anyway, I am looking forward to learning more as I move forward in this endeavor. Thank you to all of you that are out there providing us with FreeNAS, supporting the program, supporting the community, and taking the time to help ignorant people like me.
I am likely in way over my head but I've gotta start somewhere, right? After using a few external drives for backing up I decided I needed a better approach. I wanted something that kept everything backed up automatically, provided mirroring, and was always available. I looked at a few of the store bought solutions but found they were all lacking in one way or another and were expensive given their capacities and limitations. Somewhere along my journey I stumbled upon FreeNAS. I bought an older HP tower with a quad-core i7 processor, 16GB RAM and room for 4 drives. Put two new 3TB drives and two older 1TB drives in it and set then followed the tutorials to get FreeNAS up and running. After some minor issues I have had it running in a mirrored setup for over 3+ months. I am using it to back up my computer, my wife's computer, backup photos (photography is a hobby of ours so there are a lot of large resolution RAW files), and a general 'server' partition.
I am not a computer guy. I understand the hardware and what it does for the most part. At least at a high level. But software and programming is my biggest weakness. I know that my system design is marginal at best. I will likely work to upgrade it over the next year. And I will likely be reaching out for some help as I encounter problems or find myself confused on how to proceed.
My most recent problem is that the power was knocked out yesterday for a few hours when no one was home. The system went down. When I tried to reboot it it has stopped at the "Beginning ZFS volume imports". It was like this overnight. I rebooted it again and the same thing. I have seen looking over the interwebs that if there is any issues with one of the drives that it could take several hours to days to finish. True? I did see that it should not be rebooted soon after deleting large amounts of data. I cleared out a largish
amount (maybe 400-500 MB) of computer backups last week but it was over 5 days before the crash.
Anyway, I am looking forward to learning more as I move forward in this endeavor. Thank you to all of you that are out there providing us with FreeNAS, supporting the program, supporting the community, and taking the time to help ignorant people like me.
