Is freenas right for me.

[Lxkev]

Long story short. 3 years ago I migratedfrom the UK to NZ and spent 3 months backpacking on route... (awsum)

Before I left I spent weeks pulling files out of old hardrive, nas drives and even zips! I put them on a SSD I installed in a rather battered laptop. I also decided to sync to Google drive... - unfortunately laptop got stollen on day one of travels, not completed its sync.

I have about 500gb of files stored on Google drive. It's annoying not being able to play personal video of it and I don't trust it.

I don't want to be in a position in 10 years of loads of external drives/diffrent nas box's. I want to use a platform that I can expand over time.....

I've been looking at wd my home cloud. Some features are interesting but it's not really NAS drive and I want something I can increase the storage in over time, I think freenas is the better opition for me. But I need some clarification.

Questions

1. Can I do a two way sync with Google drive? Ie. Add a file/remove a file in Google or Freenas folder will it sync both ways?

2. Can I sync multiple google drive accounts

3. Any way/app 3rd party way to pull photos of multiple Facebook accounts

4. Sync with Google photos.

Ive spent the last few weeks searching the above and cant find clear answers. Would appreciate your help.

 

[garm]

1. Can I do a two way sync with Google drive? Ie. Add a file/remove a file in Google or Freenas folder will it sync both ways?

Yes, with additional software such as Nextcloud

2. Can I sync multiple google drive accounts

Yes

3. Any way/app 3rd party way to pull photos of multiple Facebook accounts

donno, probably, if it can be done using FreeBSD you can do it with FreeNAS

4. Sync with Google photos.

See above, FreeNAS is just a host, for applications start looking at Nextcloud

 

[John Doe]

from what I undersood, i feel that you do not really have the requirement for freenas as such.
Freenas is expensive
Freenas is hard to enlarge in terms of capacity

I think your needs are pointing to a different (cheaper) platform

Just to clarify:
Freenas is very good in terms of data integrity but if you sync to google anyway, there is no point in doing all this (my view)

There are other NAS OS outside where you can just throw in another disk, independent from it size and it will just enlarge your pool with the same.
Freenas point is to be stable, integer, fast for this you pay an extra price by choosing right hardware and design your pool layout.

TL;DR
if you want to do your own nas, selecting right hardware etc. checkout unraid/ open media vault (link)
If you dont want to do choose right hardware, set it up, and "i want to access my nas from everywhere in the world securely" thing. get a synology or else.
if you have concerns of data privacy (google) and want to store your data in a very secure way and you are willing to spend 1000-4000 € or USD and you are willing to spend a few month ready how to configure everything, then go with freenas.

 

[garm]

from what I undersood, i feel that you do not really have the requirement for freenas as such.
Freenas is expensive
Freenas is hard to enlarge in terms of capacity

I think your needs are pointing to a different (cheaper) platform

Just to clarify:
Freenas is very good in terms of data integrity but if you sync to google anyway, there is no point in doing all this (my view)

There are other NAS OS outside where you can just throw in another disk, independent from it size and it will just enlarge your pool with the same.
Freenas point is to be stable, integer, fast for this you pay an extra price by choosing right hardware and design your pool layout.

TL;DR
if you want to do your own nas, selecting right hardware etc. checkout unraid/ open media vault (link)
If you don't want to do choose right hardware, set it up, and "i want to access my nas from everywhere in the world securely" thing. get a synology or else.
if you have concerns of data privacy (google) and want to store your data in a very secure way and you are willing to spend 1000-4000 € or USD and you are willing to spend a few month ready how to configure everything, then go with freenas.

What are you taking about?
A Dell or HP entry level server is a few hundred and will do the work just fine. Nextcloud will serve your files securely.
Drives should be the main experience any way

 

[John Doe]

The 'hidden' cost of using ZFS for your home NAS

in my opinion freenas nor nextcloud is really safe to just put it on the www

 

[sretalla]

in my opinion freenas nor nextcloud is really safe to just put it on the www

Nextcloud behind a properly configured SSL reverse proxy is perfectly safe to run.

It is never recommended to put a FreeNAS server directly on the Internet (in fact the reverse is the recommendation)... why would you say that?

 

[Yorick]

Regarding your desire to “expand over time”: You can, and, it’s more in “quantum jumps” than small little steps.

FreeNAS uses ZFS and ZFS really, but really, locks you in to your early storage choices, particularly for a home user. This is a feature, not a bug :). This means you will decide the layout of your “pool” early on.
Let’s play this for a home user with not a lot of data. I heard 500GB. You could get six small drives - maybe 2-4TB each, or even 500GB each, that’s a price and availability question - and put them into a single raidz2 vdev. This gives you the capacity of four of those drives. Alternative: Same thing but with 8 drives.
That’ll keep you going for a good long while, fast forward to 2026, you have outgrown your storage space and want way more. Affordable drives are now in the 8-16TB range. You’d simply replace each drive, one by one, and wait for rebuild in between. Once all drives have been replaced, you have the greater capacity.
And there’s the rub: All drives have been replaced. Anywhere between six and eight drives will need to be replaced to get that “jump” in storage space.
One more caveat, and this applies to FreeNAS as well as any other NAS: Avoid SMR drives. There’s a resource in these forums that lists the SMR drives known to the community.

FreeNAS is a great system for what it does, which is stability and data protection. It comes with a learning curve, and that starts with understanding that expansion with ZFS is not “just add a drive”.

 

[sretalla]

fast forward to 2026

When the RAIDZ expansion feature has finally arrived in FreeNAS (TrueNAS Core by then too).

 

[Yorick]

When the RAIDZ expansion feature has finally arrived in FreeNAS (TrueNAS Core by then too).

Mayyyybe. I’m not assuming that raidz expansion will arrive. Or if it does, when. Planning with raidz expansion in mind is risky. Better to plan with available features in mind.

That said, your word in Matt Ahrens’ ear :).

 

[sretalla]

I’m not assuming that raidz expansion will arrive. Or if it does, when.

If it hasn't arived in 6 years, I'll assume it never will.

 

[John Doe]

Nextcloud behind a properly configured SSL reverse proxy is perfectly safe to run.

It is never recommended to put a FreeNAS server directly on the Internet (in fact the reverse is the recommendation)... why would you say that?

some years ago i set up a jail with nextcloud including reverse proxy and did some pen testing with kali.
at that time i havent had a firewall to properly block certain countries. so every script kiddy could try out their scripts on my jail.

the results with kali were a total desaster. it might be the case, that I did mistakes, could be an old jail or whatever. but my learning out of it. do not put your stuff directly to the www.

my proposal is always to use a firewall, geoblock countries and to access your infrastructure via vpn.
Anyway, this is only my personal thinking, ymmv!

I think we are leaving the initial topic, not too sure if we shall discuss this in this thread

 

[danb35]

Freenas is expensive

No, it's free. But it's true that it can't be run on the cheapest possible hardware like a Raspberry Pi.

Freenas is hard to enlarge in terms of capacity

In what universe? Expanding a pool is trivial. Disks are cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. This was the case five years ago, when this was written:

ZFS: You should use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ. – JRS Systems: the blog

...and it's even more true now. And while I don't agree with the absolute position taken in the title, it's worth serious consideration for the smaller user. Yes, it's less space-efficient. How important is that?

OTOH, if the smallest, lightest, lowest-watt-draw possible NAS is the goal, and data integrity and redundancy aren't that important, an Odroid HC2 running OpenMediaVault looks hard to beat.

 

[John Doe]

No, it's free. But it's true that it can't be run on the cheapest possible hardware like a Raspberry Pi.

In what universe? Expanding a pool is trivial. Disks are cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. This was the case five years ago, when this was written:

ZFS: You should use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ. – JRS Systems: the blog

...and it's even more true now. And while I don't agree with the absolute position taken in the title, it's worth serious consideration for the smaller user. Yes, it's less space-efficient. How important is that?

OTOH, if the smallest, lightest, lowest-watt-draw possible NAS is the goal, and data integrity and redundancy aren't that important, an Odroid HC2 running OpenMediaVault looks hard to beat.

freenas OS is free but freenas has plenty of hidden cost.
you need to have:
proper nic
should have cpu which can handle ecc ram
should have ecc ram
much more ecc ram
20% free space on discs

lets assume you have bought 8x 6tb, unsing HBA and you are already at 82% used space. you see performance impact on your system and you think to let your pool grow. what could you do?
you can buy 2nd HBA and more 6tb drives and just eat power consumption cost or you will sell your 6tb drives and buy 8 new 10 tb drives.

you actually dont have the option to mix drives and grow your pool by the same ammount you add.


dont get me wrong, i like freenas, it is a great system for my usecase and requirements.
But when i look on the entry post, freenas does not seems to be the right choice in my eyes. something more flexible, less focussed on speed/dataintegrity/cost seems to be the requirement.

 

[danb35]

proper nic

A good idea for any server, and also cheap--$30 on Amazon for an Intel gigabit NIC.

should have cpu which can handle ecc ram
should have ecc ram

You should have these in any application in which your data is important to you--nothing about FreeNAS or ZFS makes these any more necessary or desirable than they would be with any other OS or filesystem.

much more ecc ram

It's 2020, ffs. 8GB (or even 16GB) of RAM isn't a lot.

lets assume you have bought 8x 6tb, unsing HBA and you are already at 82% used space.

So assume you've already planned poorly for your storage requirements, and have also planned poorly to resolve that problem. Got it. If poor planning is going to be characteristic of your approach to server management, yes, I'd agree that FreeNAS isn't for you. Hopefully your backup planning will be better, because the likelihood that you'll need it is increasing exponentially.

You can safely run FreeNAS very inexpensively on well-supported, stable hardware. But yes, it takes some forethought and planning.

 

[John Doe]

A good idea for any server, and also cheap--$30 on Amazon for an Intel gigabit NIC.

You should have these in any application in which your data is important to you--nothing about FreeNAS or ZFS makes these any more necessary or desirable than they would be with any other OS or filesystem.

It's 2020, ffs. 8GB (or even 16GB) of RAM isn't a lot.

So assume you've already planned poorly for your storage requirements, and have also planned poorly to resolve that problem. Got it. If poor planning is going to be characteristic of your approach to server management, yes, I'd agree that FreeNAS isn't for you. Hopefully your backup planning will be better, because the likelihood that you'll need it is increasing exponentially.

You can safely run FreeNAS very inexpensively on well-supported, stable hardware. But yes, it takes some forethought and planning.

is there any reason to react so harsh?
i would appreciate if we can remain a certain level to share our knowledge.

 

[danb35]

is there any reason to react so harsh?

Yeah, I don't have a lot of patience with FUD. Your "FreeNAS is so expensive" argument boils down to one thing: you can't expand pools willy-nilly. And it helps if you have hardware that doesn't suck, which is equally true of any server platform, on any OS, with any filesystem.

On the pool expansion point--pool expansion is trivial; RAIDZ expansion isn't (indeed, it isn't possible). Yes, that's a shortcoming, though there's no other comparable filesystem that has it either. If your expected storage requirements are going to exceed ~20 TB in the next ~5 years, you should actually put some thought into planning your storage and how you're going to expand it if/when it becomes necessary. If they're < 10 TB, just use mirrors. Simple, cheap, decently redundant, easy to expand.

 

[John Doe]

haha funny guy. you get in rage because of a thread in an online forum.

please help the threadstarter and enlight us with your unlimited wisdom, before it goes further off topic

 

[danb35]

OP's questions had been pretty well addressed before you started posting FUD (although I think I'd have recommended using the built-in cloud sync capability, rather than Nextcloud). The amount of data he's talking about could easily be handled with a mirror, and even a mirror of fairly small drives--there's no indication that any flavor of RAIDZ would be called for, so the supposed issue with pool expansion really doesn't exist. The only issue that's left is to use hardware that doesn't suck, which is important in proportion to the importance of the data being stored (which, for the third time, is equally important with any OS or filesystem).

Now, if data integrity and redundancy aren't that important, I already posted another possible solution. It's cheap, draws very little power, and runs a decent NAS OS (which, on other hardware, supports ZFS, but not on ARM). It only supports a single disk, so there's obviously no redundancy. It doesn't, on that hardware, support any filesystem which verifies data integrity. It can even run Plex, though don't plan on transcoding anything with it. It can also sync to Google Drive (so say the interwebs, anyway).

 

[John Doe]

I think you were not able to really read my points or check out the link. otherwise I cannot explain such behaviour.
Anyway if you do not get the points stipulated above and take it too personally, there is no point to discuss this with you.

Let us just remain friendly and end it.

-over and out-

 

[garm]

although I think I'd have recommended using the built-in cloud sync

Won’t that be only one way? OP asked for two way sync, and that’s why Nextcloud external storage came to mind