Someone donated a pc to me. I want to use it to backup my personal data in a home setting.
I came across TrueNas as a NAS software, however, I would like to know can I use TrueNas for just data backup purposes?
Are there any instructions how to use TrueNas for just backups?
I am thinking to use a couple of large Hard drives which I think to attach to my backup server and use them for storing two copies of my data. Do I need a software raid to achieve that or if raid is not advised, how can this be achieved using TrueNas?
You have a lot of reading to do about TrueNAS and ZFS (the filesystem it uses). But in short, yes, it supports mirrored drives as a form of RAID. It will share storage over your network using standard file-sharing protocols (SMB is probably most relevant for you). Using it for data backup is mainly a matter of client software on your computer(s)–Time Machine on Macs, anything on Windows that can back up to an SMB share (I use the Veeam Agent for Windows). If you’re using something other than macOS or Windows, it can likely back up to a SMB share.
When you say two copies, I suspect you mean 2 generations of backup rather than two copies of the same backup.
For a backup of data normally held on other computers you tend to need two things:
Large storage (i.e. more than a single disk’s worth)
For backups that are very old (several years) you want to know that the data will still be readable when you come to read it.
It is unclear from your post how much storage you need - so my advice as a first step is to do some rough calculations. Uncle Fester’s Basic TrueNAS Wiki has a good section on calculating your storage needs.
Reliability is ABSOLUTELY a cornerstone of TrueNAS because it is based on ZFS which is probably THE BEST solution for data longevity. Redundancy, checksums and regular scrubs make sure that your data doesn’t grow stale and rot over time.
But this sort of capability isn’t dirt cheap - you will need to invest in the disks even if the software is free.
As for backups, it depends on what sort of backups you want to do. Personally I do the following:
System image backups of my system disks so that in the event of a disk failure I don’t need to rebuild the decades worth of software installs from scratch.
File copy backups (of my desktop files e.g. word, excel etc.)
Synchronised backups of my mobile phone’s photos.
There is different software I use for each of these (from Windows - Macs and Linux will be different again).
But as @SmallBarky says, TrueNAS has a lot of functionality - a portable hard drive plugged into your PC every so often might give you what you need with a third of the cost and a tenth of the complexity.
That’s the whole reason why I built my FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) server back in 2016. After all, the best type of backup, when properly set up, is one that is automated. The primary is the backup program that is running on my computers which backup to a SMB share. The secondary is backing up my backups from my TrueNAS server to a Backblaze B2 bucket for my critical folders. Non-critical gets backed up from my TrueNAS server to an external hard drive.
