Budget Backup?

[NumberSix]

Hi
After a scare with my NAS I have been wondering what sort of backup I can put in place on a tight budget. Although only currently about 75% full, I have up to 8TB to backup in the worst case. My thought was to buy another 8TB HD and put it in an external drive case with power supply and plug it into a USB socket. This gives rise to so many questions as you might imagine, amongst them:

• Is there any software for TrueNAS that could do the job (having incremental/differential options would be nice-to-essential copying to a same-sized 8TB drive)?
• I usually talk to the NAS via a samba share from Windows 10. The Windows machine has USB 3 connectors while the TrueNAS machine is in a recycled PC case with USB 2 only. Could the data be routed via the Windows USB and would this have a huge hit on that machine's performance meanwhile?
• Is there a better way of arranging for backup on a tight budget than this arrangement?

Thank you for your thoughts.

 

[NugentS]

Buy a 16TB disk, plug it in via USB and use that as a striped pool of 1 to backup to. There are some scripts around somewhere that will help out with auto import / export and then kick off replication I believe. I say 16TB as that way you can have a multi-version backup

Test that this works plugged into the USB2 on the NAS - then consider buying a USB3 card for a PCIe slot to make things quite a bit quicker

 

[kiriak]

some thoughts from a home user with no IT background

- consider having 2 backups and perfectly every time one of these off site
- since budget is tight could you risk loosing some data like CD rips, downloads etc. so you could go with less backup space?
- snapshot replications is super fast and has other benefits also
- I use snaphot replication to make backups on an ext USB but as a novice user I feel better having also another backup via a backup program on my desktop PC. This has other benefits also like
1. in case i misconfigure sth in snapshot replication there will be a different backup
2. my family will have an easier way to access these files in case I go away
3. I can choose on a folder or file level what to exclude from the backup
4. I have another backup in the rare case a bug will exist in the snapshot or replication code

 

[NumberSix]

Buy a 16TB disk, plug it in via USB and use that as a striped pool of 1 to backup to. There are some scripts around somewhere that will help out with auto import / export and then kick off replication I believe. I say 16TB as that way you can have a multi-version backup

Test that this works plugged into the USB2 on the NAS - then consider buying a USB3 card for a PCIe slot to make things quite a bit quicker

Hi
Thanks NugentS. I just wonder what you meant about 'scripts to help with import/export', since you then mention 'replication' too. I have never done either but I know that 'replication' is built into TueNAS - I suppose the 'Replication' you spoke of, so is 'export' something else besides? Also, I can 'replicate' to a dumb hard drive? The destinateion doesn't need to be a second TrueNAS system? Thank you.

 

[NumberSix]

some thoughts from a home user with no IT background

- consider having 2 backups and perfectly every time one of these off site
- since budget is tight could you risk loosing some data like CD rips, downloads etc. so you could go with less backup space?
- snapshot replications is super fast and has other benefits also
- I use snaphot replication to make backups on an ext USB but as a novice user I feel better having also another backup via a backup program on my desktop PC. This has other benefits also like
1. in case i misconfigure sth in snapshot replication there will be a different backup
2. my family will have an easier way to access these files in case I go away
3. I can choose on a folder or file level what to exclude from the backup
4. I have another backup in the rare case a bug will exist in the snapshot or replication code

Hi Kiriak. Thank you for a range of options there. You mention 'snapshot replication', but aren't 'snapshots' and 'replication' two different processes entirely? Do you mean that I should copy all my snapshots off to the external drive? If so, wht is the best way to do this, and also, is it true that, combined, these should be approximately the same size as all the data I have stored and made snapshots for? Thank you.

 

[NugentS]

You can always replicate from one pool to another. The target does not have to be another TN Server.

Have a look at Arwen's resource: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/how-to-backup-to-local-disks.26/

 

[kiriak]

Hi Kiriak. Thank you for a range of options there. You mention 'snapshot replication', but aren't 'snapshots' and 'replication' two different processes entirely? Do you mean that I should copy all my snapshots off to the external drive? If so, wht is the best way to do this, and also, is it true that, combined, these should be approximately the same size as all the data I have stored and made snapshots for? Thank you.

I have very limited knowledge about all these, so take my advice with a lot of caution.
I have already a few snapshots of every dataset on my TN system. The way to replicate my datasets to USB HDD is via snapshot replication.
There is an option to replicate specific snapshots at least from the manually created. But I don't have a lot of data and to keep it simple I replicate specific datasets with all their snapshots.
I don't know if I could replicate datasets that have no snapshots.
The space required is the same that all these snapshots take on the NAS. In case of no versions of the original files the back up via a desktop backup program to another file system will require more space due to ZFS compression except for files already compressed like FLAC music files, movies, VM backups etc.

Best way to experience on this is to have on hand an old small USB HDD (maybe a stick? I don't know) and to test replicating a small dataset
and most important of all to test that you can restore or have access on the replicated data.

 

[NumberSix]

You can always replicate from one pool to another. The target does not have to be another TN Server.

Have a look at Arwen's resource: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/how-to-backup-to-local-disks.26/

Thank you NugentS - at a glance, that resource looks very interesting. I will devote a careful read to it momentarily. Much appreciated!

 

[NumberSix]

Best way to experience on this is to have on hand an old small USB HDD (maybe a stick? I don't know) and to test replicating a small dataset
and most important of all to test that you can restore or have access on the replicated data.

Good idea Kiriak. I certainly have something I can do a test run with. Much obliged to you!