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I originally posted this on reddit, but I'm happy to see it reposted elsewhere. Let me know if anyone has any questions.
by melp 9y ago
I originally posted this on reddit, but I'm happy to see it reposted elsewhere. Let me know if anyone has any questions.
- twelvenmonkeys 9y agoGot to ask about the elephant in the room, but what do you use it for / host? Personally, I'm thinking of building a FreeNAS for photo storage / media, but unfortunately I've only got a four-drive array SuperMicro rack server (spare one I have from decomissioning a business). Other things I'm interested in is perhaps hosting a few gaming servers and such for friends/family (Minecraft, etc.) Hard to find uses for it other than offline-lowpower-media-storage.
- melp 9y agoI do a lot of high resolution photography and videography work. I've got about ~15 years of raw images and video files that I could probably go through and delete, but I'd rather keep them around so I can pretend that maybe some day, someone will be interested in looking at them. I look at it as a modern version of the boxes full of pictures and slides my parents and grandparents kept in their basement for decades and never looked at.
- jonathankoren 9y agoWhat's your backup strategy? My experience with the FreeNAS people was "build a second nas", but that always struck me as stupid for a home setup.
- mjevans 9y agoThat is actually the cheapest way over time. If you're able to tag stuff you know you want to keep and it's a smaller set you could look in to something like Backblaze B2 (previously a featured story on HN); the storage costs are relatively moderate, but restoration from it will cost you. I haven't yet heard of any solution along the lines of "Rent a (large) NAS for a month" for those times that you're upgrading your array and need to switch filesystem formats. Having that option would make the juggling much easier and safer. Looking at the S3 storage and bandwidth costs I imagine there is actually a market to be served by such a product. Maybe renting one of those higher end tape drives makes sense... but I can't get over the idea that even renting a stack of hard disks would be cheaper and more effective at this scale. PS: Make sure you encrypt all of the data going in to the temporary storage; those aren't your disks.
- jonathankoren 9y agoYou still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case. Personally, I don't even know where I put this second NAS, since it would need power and bandwidth, unless you really wanted to sneakernet a NAS, which would work, but seems really weird. My home nas is small enough where I can reliably backup to some USB external drives and store in a drawer offsite. According to FreeNAS, that's a horrible solution because USB is too error prone and moving disks shortens their life, and blah blah blah, and so USB backup is explicitly a WILLNOTFIX, and a sign that the requestor is stupid, as opposed to knowing full well what the risks are, and is satisfied with them. The horrible FreeNAS community, and the lack of this feature was why I adopted OpenMediaVault. (I highly recommend OMV.) I guess I could always upload TARs to Glacier. That might be a legitimate solution.
- secabeen 9y agoI have a good friend on the other side of the hill in town. We cross-backup our NAS systems to each other.
- pmiller2 9y agoGlacier is not a good primary backup. It's not designed for that. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365
- cat199 9y ago> You still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case. Think pretty much the only viable solution for this for home users is to have a 'peering agreement' with a trusted friend where you each colo the others machine at your home.. however this can be tricky because you're sticking all of your sensitive stuff in someone elses house and trading some level of full network acess to each other - though I suppose trading access to some kind of encrypted rsync-like dumps or similar might work without some of those risks being too high
- cvwright 9y ago
- seltzered_ 9y agoIts hackish (needs setting up bhyve/ubuntu vnc, don't bother with the plugin), but crashplan central can be used with freenas.
- melp 9y ago(I meant to reply to you several hours ago, but HN wasn't letting me post comments for some reason...) I've got rclone set up to encrypt and upload everything to ACD. There's a section at the bottom of the article that goes into some depth on this and some other backup strategies I've tried in the past (including CrashPlan, Backblaze, and Zoolz, all of which are awful). Check http://jro.io/nas#rclone http://jro.io/nas#rclone . I never considered building a second NAS, it does seem pretty stupid, even for an enterprise setup. The whole idea is to get the data off-site. As a side note, some of the so-called "FreeNAS people" can tend to blindly parrot a given general guideline without really understanding the reasoning behind it or why it might be perfectly valid in certain situations to disregard it. For instance, ask them about bhyve and I promise you'll get at least one response along the lines of "bhyve isn't officially supported in FreeNAS so you shouldn't use it under any circumstances, period."
- justryry 9y agoWhat's your power consumption like on this set up?
- melp 9y agoSits at about 250W, goes up to ~300W when it's running a scrub or something.
- _JamesA_ 9y agoTo put that in perspective it's roughly $0.60 a day, $18 a month and $219 a year USD assuming a rate of $0.10 per kilowatt hour [1] plus an additional 853 BTU/hr cooling load on the AC system [2]. [1]: http://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/electricity-calculator.htm http://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/electricity-calcula... [2]: http://rapidtables.com/convert/power/Watt_to_BTU.htm http://rapidtables.com/convert/power/Watt_to_BTU.htm
- pfarnsworth 9y agoRates in California would be double that or more, depending on which tier this put the user. For me, my old 8-cpu Xeon server cost me ~$50/month in electricity so I decommissioned it, however, this would also push me towards wanting to get solar panels for the house.
- no_protocol 9y agoDid you consider a low power NAS approach? Spending somewhere around $20 per month on electricity for a home server seems like a lot to me. Maybe if it was hosting a handful of VMs for various purposes, but I suppose you don't want to run a NAS as a VM?
- KaiserPro 9y agoFrom what I've seen the nas is used for video editing, so you'll need fast access that only expensive internet connections can provide. as a comparison, s3 for 60tb is $1600 a month.
- alkonaut 9y agoHow do you do backup?
- melp 9y agorclone/crypt to amazon cloud drive (acd)
- vmarsy 9y agoThat's a huge setup :) One questions I have regarding NAS is backups of the NAS itself. If I have a very simple NAS with 2 drives in Raid 1 (let's call it Drive A and B), and I want to make a physical backup of my NAS in a different location. How easy is it ? What is the best practice. Ideally you could just have a big rsync method that takes care of it, or rclone as described in the article, but what if you want to do it without any network transfer (because your connection is too slow/ you can't afford it) Does the following protocol make sense: Removing Drive A , replacing it with an empty drive C. Wait for the NAS to synchronize drive C. Then remove Drive B, replace with drive D, wait for the NAS to synchronize drive D. Taking Drive A and B to a different location, plug them, and have the backup working out of the box. Is it that easy? What about more complicated RAID setups? is there an easy "Prepare Backup -> Please insert First drive for your backup -> First drive filled up -> please insert second drive for your backup -> ... -> Please insert last drive for your backup" and then you take all those newly filled drives and shove them in a different box and they have all the data at the time of the backup, with either the right zfs and raid configuration, or at least a simple data dump in a non-raid configuration.
- melp 9y agoIf you really don't want to go over ethernet (and I'm assuming fiber is out of the question, too), there aren't really any great methods to automate this process. If you don't want to pull drives and put your data at risk, you might be able to add a third drive to the mirror, let it replicate, then disconnect it and plug it into the second system. If you're on FreeNAS, check out this section for guidelines on how to add an extra drive to the array: http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#replacing-drives-to-grow-a-zfs-pool http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#replacing-drives-to... ...but really, you should figure out a way to go over ethernet. Even if it takes a really long time, it'll be soooo much easier to have everything automated. You also don't have to risk pulling drives, etc...
- Mister_Snuggles 9y agoIf your NAS is small enough, you could get a couple of external drives and rotate them. I've got a QNAP 4-drive NAS and the stuff I want to keep backed up fits in under 2TB. Based on that, I've got a 2TB external drive and have set up a backup job to sync the stuff I want to keep to that drive every morning. There's no reason you can't get two drives and swap them every week. Just set your backup job to run weekly and unmount/eject the target drive when complete. Every Monday you just grab your drive and take it to work, and every Friday you bring the old drive home and plug it in. Of course, any backup that requires manual work is likely to get neglected eventually. "Oh, I haven't done much work in the last week, I don't need to take the drive to work today" is something I've told myself all too often when it comes to my Mac backups. Automated is better. If you have a second NAS at a remote site, you should be able to use ZFS send/receive to update a remote NAS over the internet.
- Bedon292 9y agoI already have a FreeNAS system, but I have been thinking about upgrading a few parts, like the chassis. Right now it sits in a cheap Tower, and doesn't have enough drive slots for my liking. So this is a really interesting guide.
- melp 9y agoI'm glad to hear it! I've had a ton of fun working on it, but just know that FreeNAS is a slippery and expensive slope!
- secabeen 9y agoThanks for the really detailed ZFS allocation write up. I've recently been building ZFS storage systems on Ubuntu 16.04 (one in excess of 800TB), and I've poured over the various ashift/recordsize options and spreadsheets, but your description was quite useful in cementing my understanding of why the large recordsize is useful.
- melp 9y agoI'm glad you think so. I also found it was extremely difficult to find a thorough explanation of the types of overhead I described, so I wanted to get it all together in one place. Working through it while writing it also helped me understand it much better... it's a pretty abstract concept, especially when you factor in compression, etc.
- x0x0 9y agoYour crab photo is amazing http://jro.io/photos/wildlife/ http://jro.io/photos/wildlife/
- melp 9y agoHah, thanks. Galapagos is an amazing spot for wildlife photography.
- dfinlay 9y agoAmazing setup and even better write up. It shames my tiny 2x 4tb setup. My only suggestion would be to try out gaffer tape instead of the duct/masking tape combo. I started using it about a year ago, and haven't looked back. No residue and no dry flaking over time.
- breakingcups 9y agoWhat is the noise level like? Could you comfortably keep this in the living room without aggravating a spouse or visitors?
- melp 9y agoJust replied to a similar comment below with: "I have this system sitting next to me in my home office which I share with my wife. Both of us work from home full time and the server is quiet enough that she doesn't complain about it." One thing to consider is that I'm in the northeast US (philly) where the ambient temperature is generally lower than other places. I've also only had this server running through the colder months (built it in fall), so it may get noisy as the house gets warmer in summer. I would definitely not want this server in my bedroom or living room, but so far, it's been okay in my office. edit: I should also point out that, regarding the server passing the "wife test", she tends to get hyper focused on whatever task she's working on, so background noise doesn't bother her as much as it does other people. YMMV!
- davemtl 9y agoThank you for shamelessly copying the steps in the Bhyve video I created. :-) You'll be pleased to know that in the 9.10 nightly train, the base OS has been upgraded to FreeBSD 11 and the GUI has a UI for Bhyve, also enables VGA consoles.