How do you backup your FreeNAS data?

[Bidule0hm]

In fact if you want a better bootloader then just use a plain old good FreeBSD, same thing but without the proprietary crap and the associated costs... :D

 

[jgreco]

Bootloader, yes, usable workspace, not so much, sadly. Coming from a SunOS background, I was very happy to run X11 on FreeBSD, but it just doesn't work so well with all the Windows-centric network managing crap. I can cope with OS X as long as there's a Windows VM available for certain purposes. I'm actually in the midst of reloading a Mac Mini with a fresh load of El Capitan, the latest VMware Fusion, etc., for use as a backup workstation in my office.

Someone will point out that of course I could run VMware Workstation on Linux, which is, yes, true, but between OS X and Linux, I see OS X as the lesser evil

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

if they break the interface with FreeNAS with their updates then they aren't an enterprise quality service

Code 42 does not offer CrashPlan for FreeBSD. The FreeNAS plugin is a volunteer effort and Code 42 has no incentive to avoid breaking it. On the contrary, they have considerable incentive to break it, though I doubt they're trying to do so deliberately.

 

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

Code 42 does not offer CrashPlan for FreeBSD. The FreeNAS plugin is a volunteer effort and Code 42 has no incentive to avoid breaking it. On the contrary, they have considerable incentive to break it, though I doubt they're trying to do so deliberately.

That's kind of academic though.

The point is if you are using FreeNAS as an on-site backup server for a LAN, CrashPlan is not a reliable solution for then backing up the NAS to off-site cloud storage.

There really needs to be one, preferably one that uses AES (because AES-NI) or similar, that will ship disk(s) with the data after a failure needed to rebuild the NAS. Maybe it just isn't profitable enough for their to be one?

 

[jgreco]

There really needs to be one, preferably one that uses AES (because AES-NI) or similar, that will ship disk(s) with the data after a failure needed to rebuild the NAS. Maybe it just isn't profitable enough for their to be one?

It helps to remember that a lot of these companies that provide "backup" services are using the other half of an extremely unbalanced circuit.

For example, a webhosting company might be putting out several gigabits of traffic onto the Internet but only taking in fifty megabits. Since they're charged for the maximum of (in, out) that effectively means that they've got several gigabits of inbound unused bandwidth available for free.

Making money off that virtually free bandwidth is a great thing, at least for the webhosting company. But the point where I'd be a little concerned is that their primary motivation might not be to build a world-class cloud backup and recovery solution, but rather just something that's "good enough" to "look good" until you actually need to attempt a recovery.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

There really needs to be one, preferably one that uses AES (because AES-NI) or similar, that will ship disk(s) with the data after a failure needed to rebuild the NAS. Maybe it just isn't profitable enough for their to be one?

One challenge is that most cloud backup services are competing in the "unlimited storage" market, and if I were running one of those, I would not want FreeNAS owners as customers.

The most obvious (to me) cloud backup provider that isn't in the "unlimited storage" space is rsync.net (you can zfs send directly to them), and their prices reflect the true cost of running and supporting a high quality service.

A reasonable compromise is to backup one or more shares of the most important datasets from a client computer, using whatever service and software you prefer. I will once again plug Arq Backup in this context (just a satisfied customer), since it works with Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, and Google Nearline, which are very inexpensive. I'm hoping it will also support BackBlaze's B2 when that comes out of beta.

Another option is to run either Amazon's or Google's command-line tools in a jail. There's an s3cmd plugin available, but I haven't tried it. Amazon's tools include a sync command and Google has an rsync command. Neither of these is as smart as true rsync, but it's better than manually figuring out the changes.

 

[Revolution]

Hello everyone,

can someone recommend me a little, energy saving, 2-bay NAS to backup my main FreeNAS?
It should just serve as backup and nothing more, i have two 3TB WD Green here which I would run in raid 1 then.

Greetings

 

[Linkman]

I have a two bay Synology box that I would recommend, but I'm not sure I'd use Green drives in a HW RAID scenario. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could speak to that. But the Synology box is definitely a nice device.

<edit> Given jgreco's comment below, and he definitely knows more about it than I do, I withdraw my concern about Green drives :) </edit>

 

[jgreco]

None of the two bay desktop NAS systems that I know of use "HW RAID", it's always just software RAID or chipset RAID (at best), which isn't subject to the same paranoia about TLER.

 

[Revolution]

@Linkman:

I have a new shiny Synology 2-Bay NAS now. What method do you use to backup to that NAS?

 

[Linkman]

Trusty old rsync.

 

[wissam]

Attached to my primary Freenas1, I have a second zpool which is used as a local replication target. I also replicate to a second server across the network. I had also been using crashplan, but with all the issues lately, it been a bit flakey.

can U tell us how did U configure ur zpool and also how U did replicate the data to the second server across the net ??
I'm using freenas 11 as a primary storage server and i' consider adding a new server as a secondary storage server ... any suggestion ?

 

[wissam]

Trusty old rsync.

how can i use rsync ?

 

[anodos]

how can i use rsync ?

http://doc.freenas.org/11/tasks.html?highlight=rsync#rsync-tasks