I have a HP Micro server that I want to run TrueNAS on. The server has two HDs. I want the NAS to effectively act as a backup to my workstation data HD. I understand that TrueNAS uses the ZFS file system. My workstation is Win10 and uses NTFS. My server will have two disks, one will contain a ZFS file system (disk A) for TrueNAS, the other disk (disk B) a NTFS.
What I want to accomplish:
1- Copy the data disk on my windows workstation to the ZFS disk.
2 - Have disk B be a mirror to the data on the workstation disk - I can see this possibly happening in a couple of ways: 1 - copy the files from disk A (the ZFS file system) and translate the files so that they can be on the NTFS disk (Disk B) (the preferred way) or 2- use a windows app to periodically sync the disk B, or
Can TrueNAS support this? if so, how? If not, alternative approaches?
The reason I want a NTFS (disk B) in the server is so that disk B can be extracted and easily read on another windows machine. I understand the advantages of ZFS but over the years, I have had two ZFS based solutions corrupt the stored data and it was impossible to retrieve the data.
Thanks
J
No. That is simply not a workable configuration, at least not with TrueNAS. TrueNAS doesn’t use or work with NTFS in any way–it’s a file server that uses ZFS and only ZFS. The closest thing I can think of to what you’re asking for is to run Syncthing on both the NAS and your workstation, specifying one or more directories on the workstation to sync to the NAS.
Such corruption should not have happened. But running ZFS on a single disk as you intend is exactly a recipe for uncorrectable data corruption under ZFS.
Can you explain what happened when you had corruption, how these solutions were set up… and why you nevertheless want to set up TrueNAS as backup?
The vast majority of the members of this forum love ZFS first and foremost and trust it implicitly with their precious data. This is often where their TrueNAS journey begins. I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had previous bad experiences with ZFS but this can often be the case due to incompatible or ill advised configurations.
This forum tries to assist users in building and managing TrueNAS systems in tried and tested ways.
My experiences with ZFS are from using some NAS appliances from Netgear a long time ago and I’ve purged the details from my head as soon as I tossed the netgear appliances. It turns out that the netgear implementation for ZFS was buggy as hell and I did not really understand the ZFS architecture/approach. I’ll give TrueNAS a spin to see how it works and maybe it will meet my needs. TYVM
With only two drives, the only sane ZFS layout is to make a mirror (RAID 1 equivalent) so you have redundancy. No NTFS, since TrueNAS does not handle it.
To restore from backup, you’d use in the other direction whatever app you have to make the bakups to ZFS. Or, if you have to, you could try OpenZFS for Windows.
