Recommended Strategy for home use with 2 servers (one only used once a week for backup)

[Roaders]

Hi All

I am really just getting into the whole home nas environment and have played with unraid quite a bit over the last few weeks but am now looking at truenas scale instead.
I plan to have one server that is on all the time and is "performant" (all things are relative) - used for storing and editing video files directly from the box. This will have a couple of SSDs for a cache and generally be a faster machine. I will have a second machine that is only used for backup of the first machine. It will only need to run once a week or maybe for only a few minutes every night for a backup task.

Power is expensive and I don't want to run 2 servers 24/7 with all the discs spinning all the time.

What is the best option here?

Things that I have considered:

• spin down the discs in the backup machine when not in use. This seems to be a big no on in Truenas though and even though I've found some discussions it seems "hacky", not well supported and probably beyond my level of comfort in this new technology. The backup machine draws about 30w at idle with no discs spinning. This is probably ok for 24/7 uptime.
• shut down the backup server when not in use. This seems more likely to be a solution. It seems I can setup cron to start a replication job after backup server boots. Can I run a shutdown command after the replication is complete. This woul dnot allow me to perform a snapshot on the prod box before running the replication on the backup box though presumably

I see that these questions come up quite a bit and I have done quite a bit of searching. So far I have not found a good answer to my question. I have also found that answers have changed from a few years ago (at least I think so).

Any help much appreciated. Thanks

 

[Davvo]

There is no issue in spinning down the drives if you spin them up once a week (when you need to do your backup).
For the second option you are likely to need some tweaking as you already pointed out.

 

[Roaders]

There is no issue in spinning down the drives if you spin them up once a week (when you need to do your backup).
For the second option you are likely to need some tweaking as you already pointed out.

thanks for the reply. I have actually just found a video about spinning down the discs on truenas core. Does this also work on scale? I could actually use core for my backup server as I won't need containers on there so perhaps that's my solution. Core for backup and scale for prod

 

[ikarlo]

For both options you can implement in truenas this efficient script:

GitHub - ngandrass/truenas-spindown-timer: Monitors drive I/O and forces HDD spindown after a given idle period. Resistant to S.M.A.R.T. reads.

Monitors drive I/O and forces HDD spindown after a given idle period. Resistant to S.M.A.R.T. reads. - ngandrass/truenas-spindown-timer

github.com

HDD Spindown Timer

Disk spindown has always been an issue for various TrueNAS / FreeNAS users. This script utilizes iostat to detect I/O operations (reads, writes) on each disk. If a disk was neither read nor written for a given period of time, it is considered...

www.truenas.com

 

[Etorix]

I plan to have one server that is on all the time and is "performant" (all things are relative) - used for storing and editing video files directly from the box. This will have a couple of SSDs for a cache and generally be a faster machine.

This is not your current question but editing video files directly on the NAS is highly demanding. Beside sizeable RAM, it would require either lots of spinning vdevs or an all-NVMe pool (which would then make any "caching" superfluous).
You should also be aware that you can NOT drop a couple of big NVMe drives as "read cache" and "write cache" and expect ZFS to be faster. L2ARC read cache requires RAM in the first place. And ZFS has NO such thing as a dedicated "write cache"; sustained writes will be capped by the speed of the pool.

 

[Alecmascot]

Hi All

I am really just getting into the whole home nas environment and have played with unraid quite a bit over the last few weeks but am now looking at truenas scale instead.
I plan to have one server that is on all the time and is "performant" (all things are relative) - used for storing and editing video files directly from the box. This will have a couple of SSDs for a cache and generally be a faster machine. I will have a second machine that is only used for backup of the first machine. It will only need to run once a week or maybe for only a few minutes every night for a backup task.

Power is expensive and I don't want to run 2 servers 24/7 with all the discs spinning all the time.

What is the best option here?

Things that I have considered:

• spin down the discs in the backup machine when not in use. This seems to be a big no on in Truenas though and even though I've found some discussions it seems "hacky", not well supported and probably beyond my level of comfort in this new technology. The backup machine draws about 30w at idle with no discs spinning. This is probably ok for 24/7 uptime.
• shut down the backup server when not in use. This seems more likely to be a solution. It seems I can setup cron to start a replication job after backup server boots. Can I run a shutdown command after the replication is complete. This woul dnot allow me to perform a snapshot on the prod box before running the replication on the backup box though presumably

I see that these questions come up quite a bit and I have done quite a bit of searching. So far I have not found a good answer to my question. I have also found that answers have changed from a few years ago (at least I think so).

Any help much appreciated. Thanks

I replicate to a backup server weekly. Sensitive data goes to the Cloud much more frequently.
The Main server uses a cron task to power up the Backup Server. I let it warm up for 15 mins then the Main server takes a Snapshot and relicates it to the Backup. I allow a reasonable time for this, then the Backup server runs Short Smart tests on the drives and then the Multi-Report script before tuning itself off.