Replication tasks and disaster recovery.

[panz]

So, my server is almost setup and data have been copied from old machines.

FreeNAS 9.1.1, two WD 3TB drives, ZFS mirror, GELI encryption.

I'd like to know how to setup the best procedure in case of disaster & recovery.

I'm doing backups (it's a home NAS, so forgive me if the word "backup" is not used as a professional sysadmin would) using two removable drive trays with one 3TB drive in each. I've just setup a Replication task to periodically replicate the main mirrored ZFS filesystem and all seems going pretty well (one disk for even days, one disk for odd days).

If my server encounters a major failure (the one that fries the motherboard and / or the HDs) how do I restore from my backups? (i know zfs send / recv, but I'd like to adopt a well-tested procedure)

 

[dlavigne]

Did you ever find an answer to this?

 

[panz]

I think that a backup Standard Operating Procedure could take into consideration an off-site backup of important data to Amazon S3 or similar service.

This procedure must have client-side encryption because I have to backup some medical records, so I need to use a TNO (Trust No One) method: all the data must be encrypted BEFORE leaving our servers, with strong encryption (AES).

I'd like if FreeNAS could automate Amazon S3 backups via something like Duplicati http://www.duplicati.com/

From the program description:
"Duplicati is a free backup client that securely stores encrypted, incremental, compressed backups on cloud storage services and remote file servers. It works with Amazon S3, Windows Live SkyDrive, Google Drive (Google Docs), Rackspace Cloud Files or WebDAV, SSH, FTP (and many more).
Duplicati has built-in AES-256 encryption and backups can be signed using GNU Privacy Guard. A built-in scheduler makes sure that backups are always up-to-date. Last but not least, Duplicati provides various options and tweaks like filters, deletion rules, transfer and bandwidth options to run backups for specific purposes.
Duplicati is licensed under LGPL and available for Windows and Linux".

I love this software, as it has proven to be very reliable, fast and bug free. This is a solution that I vote for.

 

[dlavigne]

Hmm, it doesn't look like they've released the source code for it, only the binaries. Are you aware of any code repository for this software?

 

[panz]

I didn't try to look at the source code, maybe it is at Google code page

https://code.google.com/p/duplicati/source/checkout