I don’t have the luxury of backing up to another offsite NAS system. I am also slightly anti-cloud. I have been backing up my PC to a pair of USB drives and keeping one offsite (bank safe deposit box) as my disaster recovery backup. I update and switch the drives every couple of weeks.
I’d like to continue the process to backup my new TN system. I can either use USB drives or use a spare hot-swap bay for a 3.5" HDD.
I tried creating a striped pool on the backup drive and using replication to maintain a current copy of the data. All is well until it is time to switch.I then have a sequence of deleting pool BackupA and disabling the replication, snapshots and scrubs for that pool. After swapping drives, I reverse the process for the pool BackupB. This may prove to be, at best, a PITA and at worst, error prone.
Can you point me to an App or a system feature to accomplish this?
Also, since the backup is written is ZFS, I can’t read it on my Windows PC. Any help there?
Why do this when you can create a mirror pool with the 2 drives and export/import the pool each time you want to update the backup? Then you can store the 2 drives in separate locations.
Nope: you will have to use a different method than ZFS in order to get a non-ZFS readable backup, period.
Details are missing. What is your entire current setup? Maybe after you post that, we can start to offer suggestions. We also need to know if TrueNAS is your only data store and copy or if you have multiple copies of the data and this is just an ‘offsite backup’ and copy number three off your data.
Are you using Snapshots for data protection for ransomware?
If this is just a simple backup of SMB shares off the NAS, making copies of the data on an external USB drive attached to Windows would be easy using Robocopy command.
Please post your current hardware, software and pools setup, etc.
Setup consists of an Asus Z370 mb, Intel I7 3770 with 16gb ram
SSD 256gb boot drive, 4 - 4tb SAS drives and 1 extra hot swap bay.
Running TN Scale 24.04.2 with apps including SAB, Sonarr, Radarr and more to come.
Also have 2 PC desktops and 2 in media centers with TV’s attached. My network is presently 1gb/s but house is wired with Cat6 so an upgrade to 2.5gb is easy.
I plan to have one pool with the 4 disks in a zraid1 array with datasets for media, backups of PC system drives, programming projects and other personal/family data.
Intent is for TrueNAS to be primary data store with PCs accessing data on NAS. Snapshots would serve as protection against inadvertant deletion or file editing.
NAS should have sufficient data to recover any of the PC’s from a failed disk or total destruction. Snapshots would also protect against Ransomware as long as I could restore the C_Drive from NAS based backups (Acronis).
I think it would be prudent to have the data backed up in PC readable form so I could survive if the NAS had a problem. With that in mind, I should use the portable drives to backup the pool via SMB shares on a Windows PC. I could continue to keep one offsite for disaster protection.
I don’t know if a ZFS based backup would offer any additional benefits.
Thanks for asking the questions that made me think the problem through. This plan should work as a start. I’ll have to solve any bottlenecks or exposures that come up once it is running.
This is essentially what I was doing except using mirrored drives instead of striped ones. I would need 2 mirrored pools with one offline and offsite and the other spinning and being updated frequently.
The advantage would be the ability to split the mirrored drives to have 2 offsite copies. In case of a disaster recovery situation I could recover one of the offsite drives, resilver it with a blank drive and recover my data.
I don’t get why would you need 2 pools? You can run a mirrored pool just fine with a single drive proven that drive is healthy; you would just need to periodically reattach[1] the “offsite” drive to the system and let it resilver in order to get an updated backup.
hardware attach, not software attach: inserting the drive back in the system. ↩︎
Just double checking. You are currently using SAS or SATA drives?
I wasn’t sure which Asus Z370 mother board you have as there are a few listed.
do you have enough ports for you your plan? Maybe require a HBA card for more ports?
Intel 225 / 226 is the recommended nic card if you go 2.5Gbs. I don’t think any others have been recommended.
