I’m curious about something for our average TrueNAS home user. Specifically how many TrueNAS systems do you have running? I’d guess 1 or 2 is the most common for home-lab folks. Maybe 2 for users who do replication, but are there folks commonly running more than that? If you are doing 3+ systems in a home I’d love to know why as well, feel free to chime in with the comments.
Excluding businesses in this, since I know its much more common there to see 3+ systems being run.
One runs 24/7, the other is a small, “portable NAS” running Core 13.0-U6.2 whose sole exclusive purpose is to receive incremental replications from the main NAS every month. It goes into a cold storage at a secure remote location.
One flash-only NAS, replicated to a first HDD-based NAS which also serves as TimeMachine target, and replicates to a second HDD-based NAS.
Admittedly, the third NAS is not of much use (other than having been an excuse for experimenting with some more hardware).
Offsite storage is the way to go. I like @winnielinnie’s approach though I’m too lazy to carry a NAS around. Replicating to an offsite works well as long as the snapshot changes are reasonable.
Come to think of it, our ISP (Comcast) might advertise this as a feature, not an intentional throttle: “we make your updates sooooo slow that ransomware will take months to lock up your backups too, giving you ample opportunity to shut the replication down, save your systems.” Or something like that.
All that said, there is value to having geographically-dispersed, electrically-isolated backup options that limit how much you’ll potentially lose if your home experiences a wildfire or whatever.
But, all those backups mean NOTHING unless you also have an independent way to recover the passkeys. Game it front to back - can you actually recover if the local stuff is gone, including your laptop, phone, whatever?
I have
1 TrueNas Core (1 pool of 8 HDD and 1 pool of 6 SSD NVME)
1 TrueNas Scale (1 pool of 4 HDD and 1 pool of 1 SSD NVME)
1 Proxmox VM running TrueNas Scale (1 pool of 4 HDD, mainly used for backups)
Best Regards,
Antonio
The backup NAS, although portable and underpowered, can be used as a drop-in substitute NAS. I would have to change its IP address and/or hostname, and create the same SMB shares. Then I’m good to go.
Needless to say, I could remove the drives from the bays and install them into a more powerful system if needed.
How many systems in a single house, or how many systems do I as a home user operate? And how many “in production,” or how many total including testing, VMs, and the like?
I have two, primarily for DNS and routing reasons. I host VMs on TrueNAS that serve these functions and because my wife would complain when the internet would go down, I needed to have redundancy. At varying times in the past I’ve run more than 2 for prolonged periods of time.
Myself, I run CORE 13.3 on my spinner system 24/7 and my NVMe system is running EE but is only on a few times a week. The NVMe system will replace the spinner system once the spinners start to die.
Two by now since I had old leftover hardware.
The first one on the new hardware is the production one. Running Dragonfish latest and is always on.
The second one gets only powered up every week for a replication of the important data on the production one. Running Electric Eel for helping also a little with beta testing.
1 system with core 13.3, placed in home, Power on 24/7
1 system with core 13.0, placed in my garage, connect on net via a powerline (i know… ), powered on weekly just for the time to replicate most important data. Gonna do that frequently due the slow speed.
I use Windows too on it for a bulk copy of files on SMR disks unusable on TN, and i rotate one of those to keep data in another place
One always on, about 24 watts.
One in the same location, woken weekly via ipmi for a full backup of #1 datasets.
One four thousand miles away, woken weekly at the same time with a wifi switch for a full backup of #1 datasets, or when for some reason #1 isn’t available or too slow for access (20mbps upload, thanks Spectum). 1, 2, 3 rule.
), powered on weekly just for the time to replicate most important data. Gonna do that frequently due the slow speed.