Snapshots and replications

[Silent54]

I'm not sure if this is possible but trying to take all precautions possible and I want to backup my NAS storage data to a USB external drive. My NAS is only about 3.2 TBs in size so not big. Just for storage, file access, and backing up stuff from my PCs. My assumption creating a backup is through snapshots and then replications if I read things correctly. I setup a periodic snapshot, which I assume stores the snapshot on the NAS. Then went to replications. My question is, will this process create a full backup copy of the data on the NAS or whichever volume I'm creating a snapshot of? Just trying to determine the size of a drive I need to use. I have a 3TB drive, which I'm sure is enough but just checking. Thanks

 

[rcrampton]

I have a similar question. I seem to be successfully replicating snapshots to a backup disk on locahost. My snapshots take up a few MB of space (few changes in the filesystem). The set of files this is a snapshot of takes up 61GB. The snapshots on my backup disk take 112KB). I can't find a single file on my backup disk (even in the .zfs folder).

it seems we need to transfer all of the files in the filesystem, not just the snapshots?

 

[Silent54]

Yea, I created a snapshot but it was only a few KBs. I wasn't sure if there was a process or setup that would backup storage data. Copying the stored data to a external device is easy to do manually. I've already done it when I had to recover my primary PC but was hoping there was a way to schedule a backup within FreeNAS to an external device. Can manual if need be but automated would be easier. I though that was what snapshots and replications was for but may be not.

 

[rcrampton]

I have no doubt this can be fully automated. I just haven't quite figured it out. Made a lot of progress tonight but not anywhere near done yet.

 

[rcrampton]

I did find that if I do `du -h` in the .zfs/snapshots folder on the volume my replications go to there was 40G of space used while the storage report in the GUI shows only 4GB and df shows 4GB for that filesystem.

I'm not sure how to relate 40GB to the list of snapshots, nothing quite seems to add up, but maybe you'll find something.