Newb dipping my toes into Nas world and I need some help

[Chief_McGill]

Hi
I'm super new to the NAS world and I'm actually just looking for some advice.

I am in charge of our Church's network and need some help with backups.
We currently run a Windows 10 server that basically does nothing except share a single 2Tb hard drive amongst office workers, this is purely for files and images.
Earlier last year we realised that we needed to back up our system. So what I did was, I routinely copied the drive onto an external and transfered it from the office building to a pc in the church building itself (different network and location).
Obviously this is time consuming and risky.
We also want to do a third location back up on the same office network.
Most of these files almost never change, they are simple things like course material, invoices or quotes, videos or past recordings. So no need for a high frequency backup. If a drive fails, going back to a 1 week old backup would in most cases not be an issue. (I do hope to get this down to at least a daily backup)

Here is the challenges...
1. We run Windows on our 'server' which can change to truenas core (This will help some mac devices be more stable in their connection to a mapped network drive (not NTFS)), I need to make sure it backs up regularly to the pc in the church, ideally at night. (The pc in the church needs to keep using Windows as it is also used for live streaming.)
2. The third location backup, is on the same network but needs to be super low cost (I was thinking just a 2gb Raspberry pi4 with a hard drive or two running OMV)

So I guess my question is regarding helping me understand the feature set of TrueNas core.

1. Can I set up a remote file sync to a Windows machine, scheduled at night time. (From TrueNas to Windows - not the other way)
2. Can TrueNas use OMV as a back up location (or are there simpler solutions you would recommend?)

I hope I make sense

Thanks!

Ps. If the office server runs TrueNas we will also add a second drive later on for a raid 1 setup.

 

[Kris Moore]

Once you setup TrueNAS CORE and make it the "primary" share for your SMB clients, you'll have a few different backup options.

First most ideal is to setup a 2nd TrueNAS box somewhere offsite, but reachable via network, so you can do ZFS replication between them. That's the most fool-proof and safest way to ensure all data integrity is preserved.

As a fallback option you can setup a backup job to send files over rsync to some remote box (RPi for example) or even use Cloud-sync to backup to an online cloud provider. Anything that can do SSH+Rsync should be supported for this task.

 

[Evertb1]

2. Can TrueNas use OMV as a back up location (or are there simpler solutions you would recommend?)

Before I could afford a second TrueNAS (Then FreeNAS) system I used a simple OMV server to backup my FreeNAS data. I used rsync for that. So yes you can use an OMV box as Backup Target. As @Kris Moore mentioned a second FreeNAS box would be ideal but I know that limited budgets kan be in the way of our wants and needs. And any backup is better then no backup.

Ps. If the office server runs TrueNas we will also add a second drive later on for a raid 1 setup.

If you go with TrueNAS you also go with the ZFS file system. So no Raid1 but Raidz in your future. However you should buy that second disk now. A vdev with a single disk is big no-no. And once a storage pool is established you will have a hard time to expand it the way you want.

Before you do anything else I would like to advise you to read up on TrueNAS and the ZFS file system (see the Documentation section) to get better informed. Also I would like you to read the Forum rules. Ik you follow up on them them you will get much better answers/advise. Best of luck.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Quite honestly, this looks like a case for me where I would steer people more towards something like Synology. The required knowledge to run TrueNAS properly is comparatively high. And without someone experienced "on-site" I see a pretty large risk of something going wrong.