I have huntingtons disease what do you recommend to help my wife with problems ?

[ethereal]

My wife knows nothing about computers and my son is 8 - my disease means i can no longer do things on freenas. what i wanted to do was find ways of making the server easier to maintain

1. my server has a single boot drive - ssd - i think if i make it a mirror this will help - as if one fails it won't take the sever down. but she may get help here with selecting the correct boot drive in the bios or replacing a ssd.

2. should i keep updating to 11.2 or stop at 11.1 - i have a sql jail which i don't know if i can redo on 11.2. but the gui on 11.2 may be so helpful for my wife that i may have to take that risk.

what do you think about 1 and 2 and is there any other tips for helping somebody who doesn't know anything about computers

thank you

 

[Tim1962]

I am no expert in FreeNAS but understand your dilemma...

I think the two issues you want to achieve would be long term stability and secondarily to make maintenance as easy as possible.

Therefore a mirrored boot device sounds like it will reduce catastrophe that she would find hard to manage

I think the second issue for stability would be to retain a tried and tested version (11.1) with updates when tested out. 11.2 will take sometime to achieve proper long term stability (U2-3?)

11.2 might provide a better UI but for a newbie this is pretty low priority.

Finally I think you would be well advised to think about future disaster recovery, such as off site and easily accessed backup that is simple or well explained how to recover data from. Servers are cheap, data and photos and documents can be priceless.

Probably better to document "how to I access my photos" than worry about FN version to start with

HTH
Tim

 

[melloa]

Agree with @Tim1962, but also:

- Version changes sometimes break things like jails and plugins, so if that sql is important, I'd look for hosting it somewhere with support, so won't go down.

 

[ethereal]

I am no expert in FreeNAS but understand your dilemma...

I think the two issues you want to achieve would be long term stability and secondarily to make maintenance as easy as possible.

Therefore a mirrored boot device sounds like it will reduce catastrophe that she would find hard to manage

I think the second issue for stability would be to retain a tried and tested version (11.1) with updates when tested out. 11.2 will take sometime to achieve proper long term stability (U2-3?)

11.2 might provide a better UI but for a newbie this is pretty low priority.

Finally I think you would be well advised to think about future disaster recovery, such as off site and easily accessed backup that is simple or well explained how to recover data from. Servers are cheap, data and photos and documents can be priceless.

Probably better to document "how to I access my photos" than worry about FN version to start with

HTH
Tim


We have many photos and videos. i have two scripts which run hourly to copy photos and videos from one pool to another and use software on windows to copy photos and videos to external hdd (i also burn them to blu ray discs) all the discs and external hdd go in fireproof safe.

I do need to go over the process of getting the videos from the camera to freenas pool 1 - rename the files and move to the video folder. also how to copy files to external hdd and blu ray discs.

i think i'll stick with 11.1

 

[ethereal]

Agree with @Tim1962, but also:

- Version changes sometimes break things like jails and plugins, so if that sql is important, I'd look for hosting it somewhere with support, so won't go down.

thanks for your reply the sql is used with kodi/xbmc - to allow me to resume playback on multiple machines