Home data protection

[cheezehead]

Out of curiosity, I'm wondering what everyone does at home for data protection for their FreeNAS install.

Edit, gotta love the browser glitching. Local-only would be no raid.

 

[cyberjock]

Personally, I think RAIDZ and RAIDZ2/mirroring should be 2 separate options. RAIDZ is quite dangerous(as many users have learned in the forums) but I have yet to see someone lose a RAIDZ2 array in this forum that wasn't due to their own neglect(not scrubbing, no SMART checks, etc.)

As far as I can think back, just about everyone that has lost data had mirrors or RAIDZ1. vdevs.

I've actually been wondering about this. Some of us more experienced users continually talk down RAIDZ1 but many of the failures don't seem to be related to your amount of redundancy. But, I don't think I've seen anyone lose a RAIDZ2 array yet on the forums. I've been wondering if its a coincidence because people that use RAIDZ2 know better, if RAIDZ2 adds that extra "layer" that protects your data more, or some other random occurrence.

 

[SkyMonkey]

My FreeNAS runs a 6 disk RAIDZ2. This is for availability; RAID is not backup. The NAS is on a UPS. Datasets get a daily snapshot kept for two weeks, and a bi-weekly snapshot kept for 10 years. Weekly scrubs, daily SMART reports (status only). Thinking I might move to bi-weekly scrubs along with bi-weekly long SMART tests on alternating weeks soon.

All files which are critical on the NAS, which is everything except my DVD rips and some things backed up for convenience sake (Steam games, etc), is backed up via Crashplan to the cloud. This is done via hardlinking the CIFS shares to a Windows machine which is running Crashplan; Crashplan is NOT installed on my NAS.

Works for me; I've tested restores from snapshots, restores from Crashplan, offlining and pulling disks, etc. So far so great; though the learning curve to do it right is not really that trivial; it's easy to go stray, especially if one doesn't spend a lot of time reading the documentation. Read it, it's worth it. Test your config, simulate failures, beat on your disks etc, before trusting the system. I've done all of this and I'm still not at the stage of trusting the system completely; however this is mitigated with my offsite cloud backups.

 

[cheezehead]

Similar here, running a 6 disk raidz2 for primary and then replicating critical (<100GB) stuff to a smaller FreeNAS box running a mirrored setup. Looking at implementing an OwnCloud setup to remove the second FreeNAS box and just replicate the data down to the desktop, have the space already available would just cut down on the power costs some.