2nd-in-charge
Explorer
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2017
- Messages
- 94
Hi All,
I'm new here, and new to FreeNAS, so please be gentle :)
By way of background, I work in a small company (~10 employees, including six s/w developers and an art director). We've been using a linux server for the past few years. It's a file server which also hosts mercurial source code database. The server had no redundancy, and its hdd failed recently. The system admin is a knowledgeable part timer (full time engineer, part time admin). He's been running manual monthly backups, so he restored most of the data from backups and brought the server back to life. It took a fair amount of time to restore the server though, most of it spent on restoring configuration. The team productivity suffered as a result of this server downtime. After that he decided that there is time for a new server, chose FreeNAS as the OS (no qualms from this forum, I suppose) and asked me to review the h/w specs for the new machine. I knew nothing about FreeNAS, so it's been a steep learning curve, and this forum has been great learning resource. The h/w is still under review, and I intend to post the specs in the appropriate section.
I want to start with asking this forum's opinion about our proposed server setup and backup procedure. I should probably mention that our internet connection is ADSL, and there is no second location to place a replication server is, so remote replication is probably not an option. The admin is a busy part timer, so it's important that the backup procedure is simple and not time consuming. If we need to script something it's not a problem, the admin and I are reasonably proficient.
Here is the procedure:
Regular automated tasks on the server:
System administrator actions:
I found a 3 year old thread that mentions a similar method, but I'm not sure if information in it is still valid, for example if it is still difficult to export and import encrypted disks.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ks-from-single-freenas-primary-storage.17316/
We do use encryption (currently cryptsetup on linux) and intend to use this feature of FreeNAS.
It it a good method?
Can it be improved?
Anything else we should consider instead?
Thank you for your help!
I'm new here, and new to FreeNAS, so please be gentle :)
By way of background, I work in a small company (~10 employees, including six s/w developers and an art director). We've been using a linux server for the past few years. It's a file server which also hosts mercurial source code database. The server had no redundancy, and its hdd failed recently. The system admin is a knowledgeable part timer (full time engineer, part time admin). He's been running manual monthly backups, so he restored most of the data from backups and brought the server back to life. It took a fair amount of time to restore the server though, most of it spent on restoring configuration. The team productivity suffered as a result of this server downtime. After that he decided that there is time for a new server, chose FreeNAS as the OS (no qualms from this forum, I suppose) and asked me to review the h/w specs for the new machine. I knew nothing about FreeNAS, so it's been a steep learning curve, and this forum has been great learning resource. The h/w is still under review, and I intend to post the specs in the appropriate section.
I want to start with asking this forum's opinion about our proposed server setup and backup procedure. I should probably mention that our internet connection is ADSL, and there is no second location to place a replication server is, so remote replication is probably not an option. The admin is a busy part timer, so it's important that the backup procedure is simple and not time consuming. If we need to script something it's not a problem, the admin and I are reasonably proficient.
Here is the procedure:
- zpool1 - formed by two 5Tb drives in mirror configuration (drives 1 and 2)
- zpool2 - formed by single 5Tb drive, exported and improted weekly, used for backups, with drives 3 and 4 on alternate weeks.
Regular automated tasks on the server:
- Every weekday night: snapshot (save the state after each work day).
- Friday night: local replication of Friday snapshot from zpool1 to zpool2
- Saturday: scrub on zpool1
- Sunday: scrub on zpool2
- Sunday night: delete snapshots that are more than 4 week old
System administrator actions:
- Friday afternoon: insert disk 3 (or 4), import pool2
- Monday morning: export zpool2, remove disk 3 (or 4), place a backup date label.
- Monday evening: take disk 3 (or 4) offsite
- Tuesday morning: bring the other backup to the office.
I found a 3 year old thread that mentions a similar method, but I'm not sure if information in it is still valid, for example if it is still difficult to export and import encrypted disks.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ks-from-single-freenas-primary-storage.17316/
We do use encryption (currently cryptsetup on linux) and intend to use this feature of FreeNAS.
It it a good method?
Can it be improved?
Anything else we should consider instead?
Thank you for your help!