Two disc setup. Backup on both and Media shared on both.

[Deimos87]

Hey. I am currently experimenting in Virtualbox to figure things out. Using two virtual 50GiB drives.

Here is my dream. I only have two 8 TB Toshiba N300 discs.
I want to have my backup and personal files mirrored on both of my drives, so if I loose one I can get that most important data back. I dont need that Raid1 speed,
so I understand that maybe the data would be first written to one of the drives and then mirrored to the second drive.
I want to try out nextcloud also on that part of the system.

The rest of the aviable date on both of the discs I want to use for just plain multimedia. Samba share and possibly plex.

How do I setup this in the pool configuration?

I also have the issue that I have maxed out one of the 8 TB drives in NTFS, so I need to find out if I can transfer the data to the new disc after I have intergrated the new fresh one into a NAS.

 

[JohnDigital]

So if I am understanding you, you only want personal data mirrored and the rest of the space will be basically not backed up in any way (JBOD)?
You have 8TB of data that you dont want to lose currently as NTFS partition?
You have an additional blank 8TB HDD to use?

If this is the case what you will likely want to do is create a single drive pool (stripe) with the blank HDD and once its up and running connect the NTFS HDD and import it to the newly created single drive ZFS Pool/Dataset. Then once that is all complete and data verified, then and only then create a second single drive ZFS Pool with the NTFS HDD, this will format the drive and data loss would occur at this point, so make sure you have everything via the import. Then id set a simple cronjob or rsync task to run once a day backing up your personal files from one disk to the other. This can be as broad as you want it to be. Id suggest including everything mission critical in this rsync task and also not forget to do some basic snapshotting too.

When and if you go this route you should realize that when a drive fails, and it will, whatever data that is on that drive will be gone. You should consider a 3 drive setup in RAIDZ1 allowing a drive to fail without data loss. But if its just multimedia you arent particularly concerned about the way I describe might work for you.

Let me know if im on the right track.

 

[artlessknave]

why would you rsync? this sounds like...a zfs mirror? if you really want to separate the drives you could have 2 1 drive 8TB stripes and replicate them...but you will have none of the self healing of zfs, mostly defeating the purpose of zfs (it will still report corrupted files but stripe pools cannot fix them).

also, raidz1 for 8TB is highly not recommended. raid is not a backup.

The rest of the aviable date on both of the discs

freenas will, by default, use the entire disk. what you are asking about here seems like not really a freenas solution, maybe check out unraid or one of the other more consumer oriented NAS systems. you can do other things with the underlying zfs layers but since that would require command line and be outside of the GUI, freenas is not really a good choice since it is intended to use the GUI, and ignoring that often breaks things.

 

[JohnDigital]

Why would you not use rsync? Its the most basic all around tool for accomplishing the stated goal, a single command ran daily as a cronjob. This way either drive can fail without the OP losing his "personal data". Yet still allowing him to realize (almost) all 16TB for his plex and nextcloud --albeit without parity. Thats OPs choice, not mine.

also, raidz1 for 8TB is highly not recommended. raid is not a backup.

Who said it was? A 3 drive Z1 pool will just be the cheapest and easiest way for him to introduce some parity to his rig.

Agreed the way i describe isnt the optimum setup, but it will work until a drive fails, no different than if the drives were just stuck in a windows machine JBOD. Pushing someone to a FreeNAS competitor doesnt seem like its helping anyone but the competitor, especially when FreeNAS will do what he is asking of it.