Hi all,
Looking for some advice on moving 18 TB of data to a remote backup of my TrueNAS system without going over the internet. I have my Primary system and a LocalBackup system in my house, and a few months ago I built a RemBackup system, replicated my data locally, and drove it to my parents house (4-hr drive away). However, due to some poorly configured snapshots and replication tasks, the RemBackup now has 0 snapshots in common with the Primary, so it wants to do a replication from scratch. This is simply not possible with my ISP (20 Mbps upload and 1 TB data cap, curse you Xfinity).
I have several ideas on how to best move data to this RemBackup without using the internet, and would like your thoughts on the possibilities.
Context about the systems: Primary and RemBackup are “normal” computer towers, LocalBackup is a Dell R520 2U server. All running TrueNAS scale 24.04.2 (will update software when I have time). Primary has 3 mirror vdevs (6 HDDs total), both backups have a 4-drive RAIDZ2 configuration. One pool per system, with 4 datasets I want to back up via ZFS replication. (RemBackup has WireGuard tunnel to my network)
Option 1: Take either Primary or LocalBackup to my parents house and do a replication on site. This would be fast and foolproof, but I don’t want take my primary offline and risk the “original” data in a car trip, and LocalBackup is rackmount, which will be a pain to use/move without a rack.
Option 2: I take the drives out of LocalBackup, take them to RemBackup, put them in, and replicate from LocalBackup’s pool to RemBackup’s pool. Then restart the replication task from Primary to RemBackup, which should now have snapshots in common and only be incremental. As long as I keep the snapshot names the same, this should work in principle right? The problem is that none of the 3 machines can hold 8 drives (not enough SATA data or power cables/ports), and I need 8 drive slots minimum to put two of my pools into the same machine.
Option 3: Similar to option 2, but take 2 drives from LocalBackup to RemBackup, and take two drives out of RemBackup to swap for LocalBackup drives. Basically, RemBackup would have the minimum (2) drives from its pool and LocalBackup’s pool to do the local replication like option 2, then when that is done I can pull LocalBackup’s dries, replace RemBackups’s other two drives and resilver the pool. I know this probably isn’t best practice, but LocalBackup’s drives are only being read, so no real risk of that backup being lost, and RemBackup already doesn’t have a current backup of the Primary, so I see relatively little risk.
Option 4: I have a 20-TB spare HDD, which I could use to create another backup of Primary via USB (I don’t have more SATA ports in Primary), then take this drive to RemBackup and replicate to its dataset, then resume replication as mentioned in option 2.
Option 5: Take RemBackup back to my place, do a local replication, and then drive it back to my parents. Also foolproof, but would be an extra 8-hour car trip. (Probably over Thanksgiving then Christmas).
I am most interested in options 3 or 4. Do you guys have any feedback, and especially if the replication from Primary to something else to RemBackup will work to then enable incremental backups direcly from Primary to RemBackup?
Thanks in advance.
and then you can remotely do your stuff.
