Looking for a good storage and backups plan

[FlippedBit]

Greetings!

First, why I'm here: My motivation is that we recently lost a very important portable HDD here at home after it was dropped. It contained all of our memories and my wife was devastated. So we ponied up and sent it off to the pros for recovery and are hoping for the best despite likely damage to the platters. All fingers crossed.

So, I vow that this will never happen to us again. ;) I'm taking this seriously; it's not just a hobby or something to tinker with. I am willing (and indeed researching) to build a NAS myself, but I will buy one if that's the best thing to do.

I'm also looking to implement a sensible backup plan, but I have no idea what that would look like yet.

To start I've got FreeNAS 9.10 running as a VM to learn the ropes. I've been through the FreeNAS documentation, as well as cyberjock's beginner's guide posted here. I've also read a number of articles about ZFS, RAIDZ, and comparisons to Btrfs. I have not gone through the Oracle ZFS documentation yet because it's very lengthy, but I intend to at some point.

I figure that once I make the decision I will effectively be locked in. If I have a sufficiently large zpool, I imagine that it will be very costly to move all that data onto a new filesystem one day.

Looking forward to chatting with you all :)

 

[Robert Smith]

Well, if you drop a FreeNAS server, there is a chance that all harddrives in it get damaged. So, build two FreeNAS servers - one for use, and the other one the first one will be replicating to for backup.

Even better if you put the second server in a separate building, or collocate it in a datacenter. You can replicate over the Internet.

 

[FlippedBit]

Yes, I suppose dropping the FreeNAS box is out of the question ;)

Would I be okay, with enough redundancy (say RAIDZ2 on a 4-disk vdev), to go without a backup server for a while? One FreeNAS box is all that I can do in the short term. I could install something small at my parents' place maybe, but we have somewhat of a metered internet connection over cable (monthly data caps).

Do ZFS snapshots need to be stored on ZFS filesystems? Do they retain the ability to be scrubbed and error-corrected upon import if they were stored outside of ZFS (I'm not sure if parity is part of snapshots themselves, or only a property of the zpool they are housed on)?