CORE-to-CORE: Full backup... What do I do?

TrueNAS General
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Could someone please give me an ELI5 tutorial/refresh on 3-2-1 in 2024?

My wife and I have 4x tn-core systems. One is our main (bare metal) “truenas” system. We call it ‘tn1’ and it is CORE. It is 14tb and it is 40% full. (about 8-10tb)

We also have a tn vm in the house that is identical (both have 100gb mirrored p4801x slog) but our tn2 virtual machine is twice the size (tn1 is 4x 4tb mirrored pairs and our tn2 is 4x 8tb mirrored pairs.) So our tn1 is 14tb and our tn2 is 28tb. And then at my father in law’s house as well as at my brother in law’s house, we have tn3 and tn4 that are also identical and 56tb each.

I feel like I am doing something wrong. I’m using rsync and rclone. I don’t know anything about True Command: What is it? Would it help us? Can we afford it? etc. And I also have never (ever) used anything other than simple file server protocols… Since OpenFiler way way back when FreeNAS first started.

We have 4x TN-Core machines so that hopefully we don’t lose our life. When should I upgrade from Core to Scale? What are snapshots: Is that a place to put ESXi snapshots or does TN core/scale let me take snapshots just like I can snapshot esxi VMs?

Should I encrypt an archive copy and push it to the cloud somewhere? (AWS/BackBlaze) Should we be doing cold storage of an extra copy?

Thanks.

Info and minimum stuff to make a post:
tn1: x11ssh/scl?, e3-1268v5, 64gb ecc udimm, 2x p4801x slog, 4x mirrored pairs, dell h310
tn2: It’s on esxi 8.x. I F’d up and gave it a virtual boot drive (that lives on tn1). I am fixing that now. It has 64gb vram, 4x mirrored pairs of 8tb 5400 wd red drives, it’s also got 2x p4801x 100gb slog drives. That board is a x11spm-?? I think it’s a lsi 9300 something? It’s running on a gold 6230n cpu.
tn3 & tn4: x10sdv-2c… 32gb rdimm, 4x mirrored pairs of 16tb drives.
Everything in our house is 10GbE. Our WAN is slow: Encryption is more important than immediate sync’ing.

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Since your TN2 appears to be virtualized, have you followed all the production recommendations from link below? You risk losing all the data otherwise.
https://www.truenas.com/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/

You really don’t explain what data you have where and how many copies you have currently.

1 Like
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TrueCommand provides a single panel to view your NAS. It might help, but is not the solution by itself.

When you want. Or not at all if you juts want a stable storage platform.

OK. Time to read the doc…

Nothing wrong with that, but you’re losing on a major ZFS feature: Replication.
Replication is the fastest and most efficient way to backup data from one system to another.

How you organise your backup strategy with two servers in house and two other in separate remote location, plus optionally a cloud backup is a whole other question.