Newbie converts from Synology

[CzarofAK]

Hi all,

I am totally new to TrueNAS and diy NAS.
We had a Synology DS216J+ running now for about 8 years without any issues. Now its time to change.
Before I buy hardware for about 2000.- bucks, I would like to discuss the system setup as I planned it

HARDWARE:
Mainboard: Supermicro X11SCM-F or X11SCH-F
Processor: Core i3-9100
RAM: 2x Kingston KSM26ED8/16HD (32GB)
SSD (TrueNAS): 2x WD Red SN700 1TB
HDD (Pools): up to 8x WD Purple 6TB
Power supply: be quiet! Dark Power 12 850W
Case: Silverstone SST-CS380 V2 or Supermicro

The trickier bit is the SOFTWARE…
Here are my requirements:

• It should host a HomeAssistant instance
• It should host a Logitech Media Server instance
• Data
• It should support automatic (triggered by event or periodic) backups from Android, IOS and Win devices from remote and local network
• Calendar and Contacts shall be hosted and synced to Android, IOS and Win devices from remote and local network
• It should host a collaborative drive (pure network storage in a file hierarchy with folders)
• The collaborative drive shall be accessible from Android, IOS and Win devices from remote and local network
• Photos
• It should create “intelligent” photo albums based on tags
• The photo albums shall be accessible and managed from Android, IOS and Win devices from remote and local network
• There shall be a Photo browser for Android, IOS and Win devices from remote and local network
• The photos shall be accessible directly in the file storage (locally only)
• Security cameras
• There shall be a security camera dashboard which allows to watch live streams as well as recordings from Android, IOS and Win devices from remote and local network
• There shall be a security camera dashboard for managing the cameras and recordings
• The recording shall be endless (overwriting above a certain file size)
• Backups
• All data above shall be backed up triggered by event or periodic
• The whole system shall be backed up to a cloud backup location
• The whole system shall be backed up to a USB or other drives
• Easy partial system recovery
• Easy data recovery
• File changelog

To facilitate the above, I thought about installing Nextcloud and ZoneMinder on the TrueNAS scale.

Using either:
Three pools

• one for the Apps
• one for the Data from Nextcloud and ZoneMinder
• one for the backups

Five pools

• one for the Apps
• one for the Data from Nextcloud (without pictures)
• one for the Photos
• one for the Recording
• one for the backups

Or how would you approach this setup?

 

[ChrisRJ]

I assume your software requirements are more or less a description of what you are currently using from Synology. If that is the case I would probably recommend that you stay with Synology. The effort to implement these things with TrueNAS would be enormous.

As to the hardware, WD Purple drives are for video surveillance but not general-purpose NAS drives.

 

[Arwen]

Using this storage hardware, (and I second @ChrisRJ's comment that WD Purple are not for NAS use):

HDD (Pools): up to 8x WD Purple 6TB

None of the below is possible / reasonable:

Three pools

• one for the Apps
• one for the Data from Nextcloud and ZoneMinder
• one for the backups

Five pools

• one for the Apps
• one for the Data from Nextcloud (without pictures)
• one for the Photos
• one for the Recording
• one for the backups

I think you need to read up on ZFS. See below links. It would appear you want one pool, but different datasets, (aka file systems inside a ZFS pool).

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer

We realize that new users have a lot to learn when they come to FreeNAS. There's a certain amount of confusion added to discussions when users pick random/approximate terms to describe things. I've spent a lot of time quietly trying to...

www.truenas.com

Their are lots of other Resources that are useful to read through. See the "Resources" link at the top of any forum page.


As for what you want software wise, all that is way beyond TrueNAS, Core or SCALE. Perhaps you can shoe horn all that functionality into TrueNAS, but un-likely. TrueNAS is first and foremost a NAS, Network Attached Storage, server. Some application support was added to Core, though it's limited. SCALE added the ability to have dozens to thousands of containers. Yet again, using your NAS for running lots of containers is mostly up to the implementer.

 

[danb35]

A lot of what OP is asking for could be done with Nextcloud. The surveillance cameras would need to be other software, but there are options there. The bigger issue, as I see it, is with backup. There are lots of backup plugins for CORE (though you should never use plugins), but it doesn't seem that anyone wants to or can really compare them:

Comparison of backup plugins?

It seems there are quite a lot of plugins now available that set up your FreeNAS box as some sort of backup server--there are the long-standing BackuPC, Bacula, and BRU plugins, the newer Asigra and NAKIVO software, and maybe even some others I'm forgetting. Is there any sort of comprehensive...

www.truenas.com

I expect the situation with SCALE is even more pronounced.

 

[CzarofAK]

I assume your software requirements are more or less a description of what you are currently using from Synology. If that is the case I would probably recommend that you stay with Synology. The effort to implement these things with TrueNAS would be enormous.

As to the hardware, WD Purple drives are for video surveillance but not general-purpose NAS drives.

I would really like to invest time an learn the skills required to setup TrueNAS.
It feels much better without being reliant on a big company...

I thought i was reading something that the purple discs are even more reliable than the red pro's. But thats a small thing to change in the setup as the prices are anyway nearly the same.

 

[CzarofAK]

Using this storage hardware, (and I second @ChrisRJ's comment that WD Purple are not for NAS use):

None of the below is possible / reasonable:

I think you need to read up on ZFS. See below links. It would appear you want one pool, but different datasets, (aka file systems inside a ZFS pool).

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer

We realize that new users have a lot to learn when they come to FreeNAS. There's a certain amount of confusion added to discussions when users pick random/approximate terms to describe things. I've spent a lot of time quietly trying to...

www.truenas.com

Their are lots of other Resources that are useful to read through. See the "Resources" link at the top of any forum page.


As for what you want software wise, all that is way beyond TrueNAS, Core or SCALE. Perhaps you can shoe horn all that functionality into TrueNAS, but un-likely. TrueNAS is first and foremost a NAS, Network Attached Storage, server. Some application support was added to Core, though it's limited. SCALE added the ability to have dozens to thousands of containers. Yet again, using your NAS for running lots of containers is mostly up to the implementer.

yes, i really have to get my head around this filesystem.
But for a not IT guy it is really hard to get the forsr few steps done, after that it will be easier.

For the pool config: you would recommend one pool with different datasets. Will the datasets be configured as like the pools i descriped?

 

[CzarofAK]

A lot of what OP is asking for could be done with Nextcloud. The surveillance cameras would need to be other software, but there are options there. The bigger issue, as I see it, is with backup. There are lots of backup plugins for CORE (though you should never use plugins), but it doesn't seem that anyone wants to or can really compare them:

Comparison of backup plugins?

It seems there are quite a lot of plugins now available that set up your FreeNAS box as some sort of backup server--there are the long-standing BackuPC, Bacula, and BRU plugins, the newer Asigra and NAKIVO software, and maybe even some others I'm forgetting. Is there any sort of comprehensive...

www.truenas.com

I expect the situation with SCALE is even more pronounced.

Yes, i thought about use Nextcloud to be honest.
But it seems not to be so straight forward in regards to the installation and opening to www...
For the surveillance i was looking at ZoneMinder, maybe there are better options.

 

[danb35]

But it seems not to be so straight forward in regards to the installation and opening to www...

Opening anything to the public Internet carries a good deal of risk, and thus complication to make it work safely. The fact that most folks are on residential Internet with dynamic IP addresses further complicates it. But 90% of that complication will be there with anything you want to access remotely.

 

[ChrisRJ]

yes, i really have to get my head around this filesystem.
But for a not IT guy it is really hard to get the forsr few steps done, after that it will be easier.

May I ask why you chose TrueNAS? It might be because you saw one of the many videos on YouTube that kind-of promote TrueNAS and make it appear to be an easy-to-build and use solution. My personal opinion is that almost all of those videos convey a more or less wrong impression about the complexity of TrueNAS. Many are even borderline wrong in one point or another. They get the creators some views, but IMHO do the community a disservice.

Please don't misread me as bashing TrueNAS. I have been a happy user for more than 10 years. But TrueNAS and Synology have a very different target audience in many ways. For using the core features of TrueNAS you would have a bit of a learning curve, but with a decent amount of motivation it is manageable. You seem to have that .

Unfortunately, the majority of what you would like to do is outside those core features. Of course it is possible to achieve those things. But the effort would be orders of magnitude higher and require considerable knowledge about FreeBSD, networking etc. So we are not talking about weeks but months. I personally wouldn't want to spend that amount of time.

Good luck whatever path you choose!

 

[CzarofAK]

Opening anything to the public Internet carries a good deal of risk, and thus complication to make it work safely. The fact that most folks are on residential Internet with dynamic IP addresses further complicates it. But 90% of that complication will be there with anything you want to access remotely.

I agree with you. But i rather learn how to deal with it and having good backups, then fully thrust a provider like synology.

 

[kiriak]

I converted from Synology to TrueNAS a year ago. I am an amateur home user.

Before that I spent a few months ( a couple of hours every other weekend) playing with TN on a ancient PC with only 4 Gb of RAM, just to learn a few basic things and see if I can manage it before putting it in production.

Synology is a turn key solution with added applications. It is far easier to set up and maintain it. But not always. I spent many may hours trying to backup my Linux PC to Synology via SSH Rsync (Backintime) without success. I took me a few minutes to setup it with TrueNAS.

 

[CzarofAK]

May I ask why you chose TrueNAS? It might be because you saw one of the many videos on YouTube that kind-of promote TrueNAS and make it appear to be an easy-to-build and use solution. My personal opinion is that almost all of those videos convey a more or less wrong impression about the complexity of TrueNAS. Many are even borderline wrong in one point or another. They get the creators some views, but IMHO do the community a disservice.

Please don't misread me as bashing TrueNAS. I have been a happy user for more than 10 years. But TrueNAS and Synology have a very different target audience in many ways. For using the core features of TrueNAS you would have a bit of a learning curve, but with a decent amount of motivation it is manageable. You seem to have that .

Unfortunately, the majority of what you would like to do is outside those core features. Of course it is possible to achieve those things. But the effort would be orders of magnitude higher and require considerable knowledge about FreeBSD, networking etc. So we are not talking about weeks but months. I personally wouldn't want to spend that amount of time.

Good luck whatever path you choose!

would it make more sence to setup something in a VM environment like proxmox and have truenas in VM taking care of the files and backups?

 

[ChrisRJ]

would it make more sence to setup something in a VM environment like proxmox and have truenas in VM taking care of the files and backups?

Overall I wouldn't think so. Yes, on the plus side a proper hypervisor will give you more freedom. But it will also increase complexity for the TrueNAS side considerably (see "virtualization" link from the recommended readings in my signature) and introduce additional risks. The main complexity, at least in my view, from what you want to do is to find, install, and configure the various pieces of software. And that part doesn't change with a hypervisor. After all, the pre-configuration that Synology has done is probably their biggest value proposition.

I agree with you. But i rather learn how to deal with it and having good backups, then fully thrust a provider like synology.

You didn't specify where you have trust issues with Synology, so I may be off here. But if it is about privacy and data security, you have to weigh those concerns against the chances of you misconfiguring your tailor-made system. The probability for the latter is not unconsiderable, if you don't have sufficient experience in those areas.

Before that I spent a few months ( a couple of hours every other weekend) playing with TN on a ancient PC with only 4 Gb of RAM, just to learn a few basic things and see if I can manage it before putting it in production.

That is something I would recommend as a starting point. If you don't put critical data there, you could even start by running a VM on your workstation with VMware Workstation (the Player version is free for non-commercial use) or VirtualBox.

Synology is a turn key solution with added applications. It is far easier to set up and maintain it. But not always. I spent many may hours trying to backup my Linux PC to Synology via SSH Rsync (Backintime) without success. I took me a few minutes to setup it with TrueNAS.

At the end of the day, it comes down to the overall situation. The more I think about the test phase in a VM on your workstation, the more I like it. It would give you a hands-on feeling how easy or difficult things are. And then you can make a more informed decision than right now.

EDIT: You didn't tell us why you chose TrueNAS. That information would be really helpful.

 

[kiriak]

EDIT: You didn't tell us why you chose TrueNAS. That information would be really helpful.

For me the main concern for choosing a NAS is data integrity.

I had quite a few corrupted files on a QNAP NAS I had earlier and on files on my PCs.
For a novice like me only Synology with btrfs and TrueNAS (or higher QNAP models) with ZFS with their GUIs is the best combination of data integrity and ease of use.

It was a combination of reasons I wanted to leave Synology and the main one was almost no support for Linux ( I think it is not a big deal for a company that uses Linux to make it's NAS line, to port a few of their Windows and OSX desktop apps to Linux. Nevertheless it is supposed to offer a turnkey solution.)

Apps running on the NAS are of secondary importance for me and I feel more comfortable running them on another machine.

 

[ChrisRJ]

For me the main concern for choosing a NAS is data integrity.

Then you have come to the right place. It is really important to have this information, much more than technical details, at least initially.

It was a combination of reasons I wanted to leave Synology and the main one was almost no support for Linux ( I think it is not a big deal for a company that uses Linux to make it's NAS line, to port a few of their Windows and OSX desktop apps to Linux. Nevertheless it is supposed to offer a turnkey solution.)

Arre you saying that you feel that using Linux as a client system is a problem? If so, what exactly are your issues? I have been using SMB as the main protocol from Linux to access TrueNAS for many years without issues. And I would honestly expect the same with Synology as the the NAS.

Apps running on the NAS are of secondary importance for me and I feel more comfortable running them on another machine.

That is in line with what TrueNAS is meant to be used for. It is, however, in stark contrast to your initial mail. Overall, such a setup makes sense in my opinion.

 

[Arwen]

yes, i really have to get my head around this filesystem.
But for a not IT guy it is really hard to get the forsr few steps done, after that it will be easier.

For the pool config: you would recommend one pool with different datasets. Will the datasets be configured as like the pools i descriped?

If you put all 8 disks in one ZFS pool, you can create datasets for different applications. Normally datasets, (aka file systems), in the same ZFS pool share disk space. But, you can set quotas to prevent one application from eating up all the free space. You can even reserve space for specific datasets so no other dataset can use that space. Setting both quotas and reservations makes the dataset look more like the old style file systems, which were using fixed partition sizes.

Unless their is a reason not to, yes, put all the disks in the same pool. Then create different datasets for different purposes.

It is generally not recommended to use the pool's automatically crated top level dataset. You would normally create sub-datasets of them. For example, the first line below is both the pool name & it's top level dataset. The others that follow would then be created by you, for your different puposes:

mypool
mypool/apps
mypool/backup
mypool/photos
etc...

ZFS datasets allow changing some of the characteristics of how the data is stored.

For example, if you want multiple versions of your backups, it's possible to keep them via ZFS snapshots. Thus, you can go back in time as long as you have ZFS snapshots of that dataset. Each ZFS snapshot only takes as much space on disk as the difference between it and the source dataset.

For example, I backup my 3 personal Linux computers, (miniature desktop, laptop & media server), via RSync to ZFS. When complete, I create a ZFS snapshot for that backup. This does require backing up via individual files, so RSync can determine if the file has changed. If not, no need to back it up again, the backup has the current file. This is roughly how I have my backup datasets configured, one per client;

mypool/backups/desktop
mypool/backups/laptop
mypool/backups/mediaserver

 

[kiriak]

Then you have come to the right place. It is really important to have this information, much more than technical details, at least initially.

Arre you saying that you feel that using Linux as a client system is a problem? If so, what exactly are your issues? I have been using SMB as the main protocol from Linux to access TrueNAS for many years without issues. And I would honestly expect the same with Synology as the the NAS.

That is in line with what TrueNAS is meant to be used for. It is, however, in stark contrast to your initial mail. Overall, such a setup makes sense in my opinion.

No there was no problem using Linux as a client system. My problem was to find an easy backup program for Linux. Sure there are many options ftom console to GUI, but I am a newbie and had difficulties with many of these.
I finally settled to Backintime as my backup utility for Linux using usb sticks. Due to SSH rsync implementation of Synology could not make it work with the NAS.

Synology also had some Windows and OSX desktop apps, like contacts, calendar, photos, backup utilities etc. but almost nothing for Linux. If I had to install Nextcloud for these, why to use Synology then?

 

[Bikerchris]

Hi @CzarofAK , just thought I would give my 2 cents as a recent new user (since 2020).

I was fortunate in some ways not to have used Synology or any storage brand beyond Windows for storage (eek).

It's no surprise that I completely agree with the experienced users that have already comments, but if you want to persevere, you can tick off most things in your list.

The important aspect is that you will find potential solutions, then just as you find it working (or nearly working), you'll experience the need to learn a great deal more to make it work effectively/safely/reliably....you may even hit a dead end.

My over all advice is re-use (almost) any old machine that will accept a TrueNAS install and get some hands on experience - after reading at least the basics of TrueNAS. Many of us have spare HDD's hanging around, try re-using them to make a test pool and then place some test data on it. Keep it below 10GB and you'll be able to try BackBlaze B2 at no cost - again though, just this takes some finesse, for example if you exceed a certain value you'll get charged not for the quantity of data protected, but for the 'chat' that occurs between BackBlaze and your TrueNAS instance.

From my experience, TrueNAS is almost at the opposite end of the spectrum when compared to turnkey NAS solutions. But, it does data storage incredibly well and I completely trust it - of course I don't trust hard drives any more, so I have multiple TrueNAS servers creating multiple automatic copies of my files.

Whatever you decide, I do hope you find a solution that suits your keenness to learn as well as your budget!