Hello.
I have question.
Is it somehow possible to make cold storage within TrueNAS?
I mean following:
Mirror Boot pool for boot and apps/docker containers(Sata SSD).
Mirror Data Pool for files(low power Sata SSD or HDD).
Mirror Cold Pool(HDD) that stops hard drives 95% of time, cause it used only for backups of Data Pool and files from Laptop and PC. How it is possible to create Cold Pool ?
I have no issues that ZFS makes some internal maintenance, but how i can force this maintenance only for specific time slot?
Cause this maintenance starts HDD’s all the time.
The linked article or forum thread should explain how the boot device and pools is designed. You don’t need to mirror the boot drive as it is easy to do a fresh install on a new boot device and then reload a saved system configuration file. The boot-pool is kept separate from data pools by design. It was done when boot devices were a lot smaller
You can simply create mirrors and every so often, shutdown and disconnect the mirrors, or simply export the mirrors.
When you reconnect the mirrors, you may need to manually trigger resilvering, etc.
(A script could do all the steps, but be mindful that the resilvering will do 100% of the data and can take long).
I do this with a secondary TN that only comes on for 2 hours a day, just to receive replication from the primary TN (that I also put to sleep at night).
That is due to temperature monitoring in TrueNAS itself. As a consequence, disks cannot be spun down in a reasonable way in TrueNAS 25.x and newer. They will always spin up again after a few minutes.
This behavior is why I wrote the feature request cited above.
For a “Cold Pool” that has known, specific time frames and use cases, you could do a ZFS Export of the pool. Then, run a command to cause the drives to spin down.
I don’t know this will prevent TrueNAS CE from temperature monitoring of unused disks.
Ideally the drives would be in an external SAS disk chassis that you can use a remote power with it as well. Yet many people want cheaper options, thus, adding yet more hardware is the opposite.
Part of the problem is that power savings is not a clear cut Enterprise storage design goal. While some Enterprise computers have good power savings, (Sun’s original UltraSPARC T1 absolutely destroyed other CPU chips for power savings), it is not a top priority.
If i understood zfs export command it something like safely remove USB device?
But than for automated backup’s i need to create user with root level rights.
That is not really good idea i think.
Cause when i fuckup some automated ransomware can encrypt my backup.
Yes, exporting a pool, (preferably from the GUI or middleware command line), is some what like making the ZFS pool safe to remove. However, the hardware, like USB or SATA, may have additional steps after the ZFS export to actually disconnect the cable, (if that is desired).
Backups that are always attached, are not as safe as disconnected ones. So, automated backups have issues, including data safety and security.
Ideally, backups would be on a 2nd TrueNAS server. This would “pull” from the main TrueNAS server. Thus, if the main server is compromised, the 2nd would not be. Except that it could pull malware encrypted data over as a backup. However, proper use of ZFS snapshots greatly reduces data loss potential.
Even ZFS snapshots on the main TrueNAS server can help over come malware encryption of data. This is because it is less likely that the malware knows about ZFS and it’s snapshots.
