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> the weak point in most budget NAS setups these days is going to be memory errors In practice, the weak point in most budget NAS setups (1) no backups "becaus

> the weak point in most budget NAS setups these days is going to be memory errors In practice, the weak point in most budget NAS setups (1) no backups "because RAID" and then getting hit by a cryptolocker (2) drives dying

dragontamer 5y ago
> (2) drives dying Is that really a problem? I'm still able to find 1TB new hard drives at my local microcenter for just $30. So its not really that expensive to set up a 4x drive RAID10 or RAID6 array. 4x 1TB in RAID10 or RAID6 == 2TB with redundancy for $120ish. Go up to 4TB drives ($100 each) and you'll get 8TB capacity for maybe $400ish. Prices suck right now, even for hard drives. (I used to get 6TB hard drives for $150... but the 4TB point still seems reasonable). > (1) no backups and cryptolockers That seems to be easily solved by regular ZFS-snapshots.
- toast0 5y ago
  Hard drives do die, and while many (possibly most?) deaths are random materials failure, some deaths are correlated to batches and some are firmware problems which are often correlated. Avoiding these is hard. Ideally, you want to get drives from different batches and offset power on times by about a week per drive. Assuming you will notice a failure, obtain a replacement, and replace the failed drive within a week. If that's not realistic, you should wait even longer between drive power on, which makes setup a very long process. It's also hard to ensure drives are from different batches unless you buy in person or get different brands, but there's not four brands to buy from anymore. It's a little easier to do best practices when you replace drives (to get more capacity for example)... Buy one new drive once every other month, and you probably will get different batches, and you'll most likely have sufficient time to replace drives without running into the same firmware bug on all the drives.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  If only all these mega corporations that get hit by crypto lockers had heard the magic bullet of ZFS! /s
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    If any corporation has a proper and secure backup, then crypto-lockers are simply a null-and-void issue. You get cryptolockered, then just restore from backup and you're fine. For online backups: ZFS snapshots ought to handle the common cryptolocker case (where cryptolocker infects the client machine and encrypts all the data). However, if the virus stops there, the ZFS snapshot (which is controlled on the NAS) can restore your data from the last snapshot no problem. I'm sure that criminal gangs are willing to go one step further and maybe attack the NAS and delete the ZFS snapshots, but its still a 2nd step that must occur before you have a significant failure. --------------------- Its not a magic bullet, but its a significant defense mechanism that seems to handle the current, common case.
  - wyager 5y ago
    This but unironically. Sometimes I find a technology or strategy where I think “people are insane for not using this”. ZFS is definitely one of those. It reduces so many IT costs by orders of magnitude. (Storage requirements for denormalized data, backup time and bandwidth, frequency of backups, procedural cost of restoring from backups, cost of dealing with disk failure, data corruption costs, etc.)
wyager 5y ago
ZFS backups are easier than anything else I’ve used. I just zap incremental snapshots over to an rsync.net ZFS account. For drives dying, I just ordered the 3 drives in my zpool from 3 different websites (Newegg, Amazon, and someone I forget) so they’d be different batches.
- walrus01 5y ago
  > ZFS backups are easier the weak point in home based geographically unique off-site backups (like, put a small zfs box in your family member's house) is that while the ordinary residential internet user might have cablemodem service with 500 Mbps down, you may also have only 16-20Mbps up. Good luck backing up 15-20TB over 16Mbps upstream and possible 1TB/month quotas from an ISP.
  - Jemm 5y ago
    Reality here is lucky to have 50MBps down and 7MBps up and I am in the fourth largest city in North America. More likely 30/3 with actual throughput being 20/1.
  - wyager 5y ago
    If you don’t have enough bandwidth to do incremental ZFS snapshot backups, you don’t have enough bandwidth to do any kind of backups. ZFS incremental snapshots are more efficient than anything else I’ve used, e.g. rsync.

dragontamer 5y ago

> (2) drives dying Is that really a problem? I'm still able to find 1TB new hard drives at my local microcenter for just $30. So its not really that expensive to set up a 4x drive RAID10 or RAID6 array. 4x 1TB in RAID10 or RAID6 == 2TB with redundancy for $120ish. Go up to 4TB drives ($100 each) and you'll get 8TB capacity for maybe $400ish. Prices suck right now, even for hard drives. (I used to get 6TB hard drives for $150... but the 4TB point still seems reasonable). > (1) no backups and cryptolockers That seems to be easily solved by regular ZFS-snapshots.

toast0 5y ago
Hard drives do die, and while many (possibly most?) deaths are random materials failure, some deaths are correlated to batches and some are firmware problems which are often correlated. Avoiding these is hard. Ideally, you want to get drives from different batches and offset power on times by about a week per drive. Assuming you will notice a failure, obtain a replacement, and replace the failed drive within a week. If that's not realistic, you should wait even longer between drive power on, which makes setup a very long process. It's also hard to ensure drives are from different batches unless you buy in person or get different brands, but there's not four brands to buy from anymore. It's a little easier to do best practices when you replace drives (to get more capacity for example)... Buy one new drive once every other month, and you probably will get different batches, and you'll most likely have sufficient time to replace drives without running into the same firmware bug on all the drives.
tinus_hn 5y ago
If only all these mega corporations that get hit by crypto lockers had heard the magic bullet of ZFS! /s
- dragontamer 5y ago
  If any corporation has a proper and secure backup, then crypto-lockers are simply a null-and-void issue. You get cryptolockered, then just restore from backup and you're fine. For online backups: ZFS snapshots ought to handle the common cryptolocker case (where cryptolocker infects the client machine and encrypts all the data). However, if the virus stops there, the ZFS snapshot (which is controlled on the NAS) can restore your data from the last snapshot no problem. I'm sure that criminal gangs are willing to go one step further and maybe attack the NAS and delete the ZFS snapshots, but its still a 2nd step that must occur before you have a significant failure. --------------------- Its not a magic bullet, but its a significant defense mechanism that seems to handle the current, common case.
- wyager 5y ago
  This but unironically. Sometimes I find a technology or strategy where I think “people are insane for not using this”. ZFS is definitely one of those. It reduces so many IT costs by orders of magnitude. (Storage requirements for denormalized data, backup time and bandwidth, frequency of backups, procedural cost of restoring from backups, cost of dealing with disk failure, data corruption costs, etc.)

wyager 5y ago

ZFS backups are easier than anything else I’ve used. I just zap incremental snapshots over to an rsync.net ZFS account. For drives dying, I just ordered the 3 drives in my zpool from 3 different websites (Newegg, Amazon, and someone I forget) so they’d be different batches.

walrus01 5y ago
> ZFS backups are easier the weak point in home based geographically unique off-site backups (like, put a small zfs box in your family member's house) is that while the ordinary residential internet user might have cablemodem service with 500 Mbps down, you may also have only 16-20Mbps up. Good luck backing up 15-20TB over 16Mbps upstream and possible 1TB/month quotas from an ISP.
- Jemm 5y ago
  Reality here is lucky to have 50MBps down and 7MBps up and I am in the fourth largest city in North America. More likely 30/3 with actual throughput being 20/1.
- wyager 5y ago
  If you don’t have enough bandwidth to do incremental ZFS snapshot backups, you don’t have enough bandwidth to do any kind of backups. ZFS incremental snapshots are more efficient than anything else I’ve used, e.g. rsync.