Is it OK to Run a NAS Part-Time?

[Charyus]

Greetings;

My FreeNAS 11.2 machine is a Dell 3500, 24Gb ecc RAM, with (2) 10 Tb mirrored drives, presently with about 4 Tb of data. I tend to back things up once a week, which I think is reasonable for our purposes. What I'm wondering is whether this is OK with the NAS itself, because as I understand it, they're intended to run 24/7. Will running for only 4 to 8 hours a week be sufficient for the server to perform its data-checking functions, updates, and whatever else it needs to do? Am I compromising its performance by doing so?

Thanks.

 

[Chris Moore]

There are some health monitoring features that will never have an opportunity to run for example SMART testing on the drives and data health utilities like ZFS scrub of the pool that will never run because you're not giving the time to do so.
FreeNAS is not just about backing up the data that you have on another system it's about keeping the data that it's on the FreeNAS system secure.

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