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I also have a ZFS NAS and a separate backup server for the NAS that only gets turned on once a week. I disagree about his recommendation to avoid encryption. I

I also have a ZFS NAS and a separate backup server for the NAS that only gets turned on once a week. I disagree about his recommendation to avoid encryption. I keep the NAS and backup server drives encrypted. It’s not a big deal to unlock the drives at boot with a password and I’ve never had any issues with it. If someone breaks in and steals one of the servers, at least they won’t have access to years of all of my documents backed up. This author’s setup looks good, but I think most people would get burned out by the complexity unless you really like managing servers, automating things with scripts, and navigating the little quirks that pop up with the hardware and software involved. A complex solution isn’t necessarily better if you find yourself not investing the time needed to maintain it. I think most people would be better off trusting one of the online backup services rather than spending thousands of dollars building and maintaining a pair of backup servers. If you’re worried about losing data, signing up for two separate backup services could still be cheaper than building and running two separate NAS servers. Start with easy backup solutions first to get something going. Then consider the more complicated options later.

sgarland 5y ago
> most people would get burned out by the complexity unless you really like managing servers, automating things with scripts, and navigating the little quirks that pop up with the hardware and software involved. I didn't see the author's stated OS they use for their NAS, but depending on what it is, yes. {Free, True}NAS are dead easy to use as long as you stay inside the confines of the GUI, and hugely reliable. Anything else is no man's land. Running ZoL and you did a routine kernel update? Enjoy your new read-only ZFS pool! I have a setup very similar to the author's, with a bunch of Debian VMs on top of Proxmox. Can confirm that even with Packer and Ansible handling base images and configuration, weird edge cases pop up that take quite a while to track down.
- mbiondi 5y ago
  I thought the same about Free/True NAS until I lost a ton of stuff. Be careful with these. Also, for big backups the performance has been terrible. I carefully followed their guide and the write speed is just dismal.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > {Free, True}NAS are dead easy to use as long as you stay inside the confines of the GUI, and hugely reliable. I’ve used FreeNAS (now TrueNAS). Great at first but eventually I started hit snags and bugs. I still use TrueNAS but I wouldn’t say it’s 100% reliable, especially across upgrades. > Anything else is no man's land. Running ZoL and you did a routine kernel update? Enjoy your new read-only ZFS pool! FWIW, I have a separate ZoL server that has been bulletproof, even with frequent upgrades. I did, however, run into a kernel issue with TrueNAS after an upgrade that caused some hardware issues about once a week. My options were either to downgrade to an older TrueNAS until they fixed it (still not fixed) or buy new hardware.
digitallyfree 5y ago
I have something simpler than yours, with a small Proxmox server as my NAS (no ZFS) and backups stored to a second disk. Occassionally I will backup the contents of that machine to external drives. In the future I plan on doing something similar to what you have, with a powerful ZFS server and my current server accessing the main server using a read-only interface as a second backup. It does take work to maintain, and I don't look forward to the day when I have a full server failure and need to scramble to replace the unit, restore from backups, and all that. Ideally I would have a pair of servers to handle that eventuality... and down the rabbit hole we go. Ultimately, I guess this all is a tradeoff - I know many engineers who swear on their cloud services, and they simply don't have the time and experience to maintain dedicated servers. While Synology devices and FreeNAS make things simpler, that's for a best-case scenario as you need the technical knowledge to deal with the issues that will eventually pop up. Honestly the cloud is what I recommend for all but the most technical folk, with the addition of external disks off-site for the most critical files.

sgarland 5y ago

> most people would get burned out by the complexity unless you really like managing servers, automating things with scripts, and navigating the little quirks that pop up with the hardware and software involved. I didn't see the author's stated OS they use for their NAS, but depending on what it is, yes. {Free, True}NAS are dead easy to use as long as you stay inside the confines of the GUI, and hugely reliable. Anything else is no man's land. Running ZoL and you did a routine kernel update? Enjoy your new read-only ZFS pool! I have a setup very similar to the author's, with a bunch of Debian VMs on top of Proxmox. Can confirm that even with Packer and Ansible handling base images and configuration, weird edge cases pop up that take quite a while to track down.

mbiondi 5y ago
I thought the same about Free/True NAS until I lost a ton of stuff. Be careful with these. Also, for big backups the performance has been terrible. I carefully followed their guide and the write speed is just dismal.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> {Free, True}NAS are dead easy to use as long as you stay inside the confines of the GUI, and hugely reliable. I’ve used FreeNAS (now TrueNAS). Great at first but eventually I started hit snags and bugs. I still use TrueNAS but I wouldn’t say it’s 100% reliable, especially across upgrades. > Anything else is no man's land. Running ZoL and you did a routine kernel update? Enjoy your new read-only ZFS pool! FWIW, I have a separate ZoL server that has been bulletproof, even with frequent upgrades. I did, however, run into a kernel issue with TrueNAS after an upgrade that caused some hardware issues about once a week. My options were either to downgrade to an older TrueNAS until they fixed it (still not fixed) or buy new hardware.

digitallyfree 5y ago

I have something simpler than yours, with a small Proxmox server as my NAS (no ZFS) and backups stored to a second disk. Occassionally I will backup the contents of that machine to external drives. In the future I plan on doing something similar to what you have, with a powerful ZFS server and my current server accessing the main server using a read-only interface as a second backup. It does take work to maintain, and I don't look forward to the day when I have a full server failure and need to scramble to replace the unit, restore from backups, and all that. Ideally I would have a pair of servers to handle that eventuality... and down the rabbit hole we go. Ultimately, I guess this all is a tradeoff - I know many engineers who swear on their cloud services, and they simply don't have the time and experience to maintain dedicated servers. While Synology devices and FreeNAS make things simpler, that's for a best-case scenario as you need the technical knowledge to deal with the issues that will eventually pop up. Honestly the cloud is what I recommend for all but the most technical folk, with the addition of external disks off-site for the most critical files.