OT: NASeses?

[T i m]

Ok, cool, that's not a bad history. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Ok, thanks for the feedback.

Cheers, T i m

[F]

I have bought HP Proliants when they have been on offer (which is fairly often). Buy in hard drives to suit your needs and install FreeNAS on a thumb drive inside the box.

[T i m]

Quite and thanks (for risking it). ;-)

Sure, other than it may be we are being tricked into thinking something has a longer life when it just has a longer warranty (so protects you from financial rather than data risk as such)?

Looks good. I'll give it a trial later (assuming these NAS'ses don't have their own built in 'pull' backup etc).

Not good for 'a backup' solution. ;-(

A mate often used to evaluate backup solutions and would run them three times. If they weren't 100% all three times then they weren't considered worth having.

Is this across more than one machine Chris?

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

I guess it all depends on what causes the loss of data?

True.

Quite. As I only have 3 x 500G laptop drives in my WHS I don't run any form of drive / data duplication on that but have an external drive I back the server itself up on now and again.

I think I need a KISS solution for him. ;-)

Thinking on, one of the things he seems to do fairly often is 'bugger up' his system so protecting that (with the ability to have a 'bare iron' system restore being handy), along with his data is fairly important.

As I have done (Open Media Vault / 3TB in this case).

Maybe a PI and a couple of big (3.5" mans powered) / external drives on a Pi3 would be ok for him too (as you say, it only being 'a mirror' as such)? Do any Pi'able NAS solutions support ZFS I wonder (if that's a good thing to have for resilience).

Cheers, T i m

[Fredxx]

There is a belief that you lots of RAM and processing power for ZFS and the Pi is simply unsuitable.

[T i m]

Could you recommend a good base model please Andrew as there seem to be many variants out there?

I was thinking of getting one and a couple of drives and say OMV / FreeNAS and seeing how I get on. That might leave room for my mate to buy some decent backup software etc.

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Ok, but for Mirroring?

Given this is just a domestic environment and he hasn't bee running any sort of backup in any case?

Cheers, T i m

[Fredxx]

The simplest is a USB drive and run FreeFileSync. Having a NAS server sounds like overkill.

[John Rumm]

Most practical solutions will need some software of some sort running on the client machines to push the backup from that end. The NAS can't so easily reach out and "pull" backups from the clients - at least not without some preconfiguration on the PCs.

Does not need to be matching necessarily - a lower end box as a backup for you main nas, just needs to support rsync or similar. Then the main one can periodically copy itself to the other at the file system level.

There are differences between the various types that are not necessarily just related to MTBF. The NAS optimised drives will be setup for cool running and low vibration as key requirements, and they are designed to behave well in a RAID environment.

The other thing to keep in mind is the power consumption - the dedicated nas boxes are usually very low power in comparison. (typically < 30W operational and significantly less quiescent)

Yup its a option. There are also open source NAS platforms available that are well supported. If high performance is not a key requirement then even a Raspberry Pi could be pressed into service.

Old WHS probably only supports SMB/CIFS 1.0 which is now deprecated, and Win 10 clients in particular will do their best to not talk to them (you can override the default and turn the V1 client it back on though)

(although modern win server systems have some quite compelling storage management facilities that make it quite attractive for file sharing applications - a fairly pricey option though for a home user unless they are very serious!)

Mostly Netgear "Duo" boxes. Mainly for small office installs. They share files, they backup to each other each night. They are reliable and seem to mostly just work. There have been several iterations of the hardware under the hood and also the OS has changed dramatically over time. Performance is not massive (at least on the older ones anyway) - they need gig ethernet, but usually won't saturate it. I used one here for file serving and as a home media server as well as for many years. It now acts as a backup.

My current main one is a QNAP TS-453A four drive unit[1], that also supports the addition of extra drive frames to expand capacity (one can daisy chain another 5 drive box on the side). It has a video output and remote control as well so can be used directly as a media centre if you wanted. Its got dedicate hardware support for things like video transcoding and encryption. It can support running a couple of virtual guess OSes - so you could load a complete server OS onto it as well if you wanted. Its connects up via 4 off 1 gig ethernet links (so ideally you need a switch that supports link aggregation). It has the oomph to saturate all of them concurrently.

[1]

The biggest problem I find with buying QNAP gear is the *massive* range of devices they sell - many very similar at first glance - it can take quite a bit of work drilling down through specs to find what is going to be the best option for your application. (I short listed a few then had to speak to their pre-sales team to work out which to go for!)

It might depend on the drives they have in it, but I have not had any problems with heat so far. Having said that, they do a vast range of devices and support several generations of hardware model concurrently - so its quite like some are better than others.

According to the internal monitoring the drive temperature was nudging

40 deg C in the recent very hot spell. I took the precaution of leaving the front door of the comms cabinet open just in case. Its at the top and so probably gets extra heat from the devices below. Vis:

[John Rumm]

Often people (and I include myself in the early days) have lots of difficulty moving from setting up file sharing in earlier versions of windows compared to later ones. What was previously very easy, seemed to become much harder.

Most of the reason for this is that many old windows systems were sat on top of FAT file systems that had no concept of users or access rights etc. So all you needed to do was share, and then assign the basic rights for the share. You could finesse it a bit by sharing only with specific users, but there was no more granularity than that. If you shared a folder with a user with RW, then they got RW to all of it.

With later versions of windows running on NTFS - the game changes quite dramatically. The sharing and its "security" becomes secondary. You may as well create open shares with full access, since its now the file system that will enforce the security. Its also far more granular. You can assign rights at a folder by folder or even file by file level, and the rights themselves are far more fine grained.

[dennis]

A second NAS is almost essential. I run two Synology NASes, cheap 215j boxes.

I use file history to backup files as they change onto the first NAS.

Then I run the Synology hyper backup on the NAS box to do daily backups to the second NAS.

I also do an encrypted sync onto windows one drive as I have the space and the NAS has software to do so.

I used to do an rsync backup to a readyNAS but it didn't do proper daily backups like hyper backup does.

[dennis]

Not necessarily cheaper than a NAS box though. Old PCs could use 2-4 units of electricity a day more than a NAS box so cost more than the NAS box after a year or so.

[dennis]

With windows 10 you can use file history to backup files as they change. You would also want to do a system image to make it easy to recover the OS, but you can just download windows and reinstall it.

The software to do both is standard on win10.

Earlier versions have backup software but its not something I have used.

[dennis]

Mirroring on a NAS does not mean you won't lose your data. You can get software errors that corrupt both copies as well as various hardware faults. Mirroring is to increase the availability of the NAS.

You need two NAS boxes to do the job properly. Backup to the first NAS and then daily backups of that NAS to the second.

Its preferable if the second NAS is on a different site.

Some NAS boxes come with backup software to allow cloud storage to be used for backup instead of a second NAS..

[T i m]

Agreed.

True.

Agreed.

Possibly OTT for my mate. ;'-)

We used to mirror Netware servers over fiber optic. Server mirroring / duplexing?

His greenhouse?

Yes, I think FreeNAS can use such.

Just for the S*G's ... I have a second PC here with two swappable drive bays and so I pulled my everyday drives and fitted two identical

250G Seagate drives.

I then downloaded FreeNAS 11.1 and burned it to a CD, then booted from it and installed FreeNAS onto a 32G Flash drive (it was all I had to hand and that bit was easy enough).

I connected to the admin GUI over my LAN ok and I have been though several loops of setting up mirrored / ZFS volume / dataset (done,

250G) a 'Windows' share SMB service is on and a Test user but don't see anything 'appear' my network from XP or W10?

This is perfectly typical (for me) of anything 'non Windows' not being 'click simple'. ;-(

I'll see if I can find Dummies walk through to setting up a Windows share on FreeNAS 11.1 ... it really should be intuitive though shouldn't it, like it was setting up both V 1 and 2 of the WHS ... ;-(

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

I'm not sure we will start there though.

Ok.

Neat.

Ok.

So, can you boot from a generic CD and re image a new client drive back off the NAS's using that solution (like I can WHS)?

The point is, user data is fairly easy to backup on a file server or in the cloud (some of which he is already doing) but when he can't do easily is re-write his system drive if he screws it up. Yes, he can re-install Windows from scratch but he has a load of video and photo editing apps and it all takes some time.

With WHS he can create a manual backup after he's installed some new software and it will do a backup of the entire system every day ... and more importantly, even I can set it up! ;-)

They just don't make it any more and I don't think I've got the time to give him anything other than an 'appliance' NAS and good client backup software and hope it's better than nothing?

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

But that doesn't give him shared access to his stuff from his 3 machines?

Cheers, T i m

[Fredxx]

Why doesn't he keep a mirrored copy on each machine?

[T i m]

I have generally found it reasonably easy to get somewhere and there are usually plenty of context sensitive help popups along the way.

Yup.

Yup.

WHS presents that early simplistic UI onto a full Windows Server.

I was quite happy setting up shares and permissions on both NT Server and Netware servers, it's just most of the NAS software I've tried (including the OMV I've had running here for some months now) don't appear 'logical or intuitive' to me at all.

The test of 'good software' to me is can I use it, or at least set it up without reference to the manual, because unless the manual is covering *exactly* what I want to do, on the version I'm trying to do it on, my patience (normally nearly infinite) is tested very very quickly.

I guess that's because I'm aware just how easy it can be?

Cheers, T i m