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Once i made a FreeNAS and i lost all the wedding photo's. The significant other was not amused and i vowed to use a lot of backups. I have a lot of old NASes, f

Once i made a FreeNAS and i lost all the wedding photo's. The significant other was not amused and i vowed to use a lot of backups. I have a lot of old NASes, from NetGear to Qnap to Synology. Perk of the job. But these days i use a Synology DS2412 in a SHR RAID6 configuration. Only 1 of the 12 drives failed thus far, but maybe this is because most of the time it's powered off and activated using WakeOnLan. For day to day i use an old laptop with 2 SATA 1TB disks in a Debian configuration. Documentation and photo's get frequently backupped to the big nas and the big nas uses Hyperbackup to a Hetzner storage that costs me around $5 a month. So now they're in three systems, two different media and one other different place. It would be a pain to restore when the house burns down, but its doable. That reminds me.. i should document the restore process somewhere. There is no way the other family members can do this right now.

reddalo 1y ago
>and i lost all the wedding photo's And you didn't have a backup? Ouch. I'm sorry for you. >i should document the restore process somewhere. There is no way the other family members can do this right now. I agree. If I passed away, or something seriously bad happened to me, nobody in my family would be able to recover any memories. I should document how to recover all the data in a simple way. And probably print the document and store it somewhere easily accessible.
1oooqooq 1y ago
modern hdds should not be stored powered down. they should be spinning most of the time in indle to lubricate things. or so I've heard. i have my nas setup as such and have 10y drivers with constant success (they move from main to spare after 5y). i also aim for the 30w amd cpu (which drawn around 5w in idle) for drivers i spend $300 every 5yr on new ones, so i can keep growing and renewing. and is a pretty low cost considering cloud alternatives.
- b3lvedere 1y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but in the field can somehow differ greatly from theory. I have had no real errors since i've used this big NAS. I do admit i personally have a lucky track record regarding harddisks. I think in the more than 25 years i have used spinning hardddisks, about 3 or 4 ever failed me. I don't know why, but most technology i use just keeps on working pretty long. :) I stil have lots of 500 and 1TB disks around in various old NAS devices i haven't booted up in ages. When electricity got quite expensive i decided to stop using those. The amount of data i really really want to protect is less than 1TB in total i think. All the other stuff on the big NAS is 'nice to have' but not life crushing should it be gone forever.
lossyalgo 1y ago
I (and surely others) would love to know the reason(s) for the FreeNAS failure i.e. what kind of configuration did you have and what went wrong?
- b3lvedere 1y ago
  Oh nothing fancy i'm afraid. The WD disk it was on just died. There was no RAID of any other rebuild back then, just a single disk. Luckily we got about 80% of the pictures back via family and friends. Rebuilding that from various sources was a pain though. It taught me to use backups the hard way :)
  - lossyalgo 1y ago
    I'm confused - you used FreeNAS on a single disk? I wasn't even aware that was possible. Thankfully you were able to recover! I think almost everyone has learned to make backups the hard way at some point. I am the local IT guy among a lot of friends (and by extension, their friends) and so I was always the go-to when things got bad. At some point 15+ years ago, I bought "Restorer2k" which was able to save a lot of data from not-quite-dead drives, some of had to go into the freezer overnight in ziplock bags to try and unlock a frozen read-head (rarely helped), others I was able to replace the controller via eBay. One friend lost an almost finished PhD dissertation (months of work). I remember the tears when I was able to recover that :) At some point I got tired of data recovery and started telling people to buy a Mac + cheap external drive and use the Time Machine feature. Interestingly, I haven't gotten many phone calls the last few years ;)
    - b3lvedere 1y ago
      Err yeah. There were more disks, but I wasn't that experienced, so i made Volumes/SMB shares per disk. FreeNAS itself was on a bootable USB stick. Who needs a big huge single volume eh? :) This was back in 2007 as well.

reddalo 1y ago

>and i lost all the wedding photo's And you didn't have a backup? Ouch. I'm sorry for you. >i should document the restore process somewhere. There is no way the other family members can do this right now. I agree. If I passed away, or something seriously bad happened to me, nobody in my family would be able to recover any memories. I should document how to recover all the data in a simple way. And probably print the document and store it somewhere easily accessible.

1oooqooq 1y ago

modern hdds should not be stored powered down. they should be spinning most of the time in indle to lubricate things. or so I've heard. i have my nas setup as such and have 10y drivers with constant success (they move from main to spare after 5y). i also aim for the 30w amd cpu (which drawn around 5w in idle) for drivers i spend $300 every 5yr on new ones, so i can keep growing and renewing. and is a pretty low cost considering cloud alternatives.

b3lvedere 1y ago
I get where you're coming from, but in the field can somehow differ greatly from theory. I have had no real errors since i've used this big NAS. I do admit i personally have a lucky track record regarding harddisks. I think in the more than 25 years i have used spinning hardddisks, about 3 or 4 ever failed me. I don't know why, but most technology i use just keeps on working pretty long. :) I stil have lots of 500 and 1TB disks around in various old NAS devices i haven't booted up in ages. When electricity got quite expensive i decided to stop using those. The amount of data i really really want to protect is less than 1TB in total i think. All the other stuff on the big NAS is 'nice to have' but not life crushing should it be gone forever.

lossyalgo 1y ago

I (and surely others) would love to know the reason(s) for the FreeNAS failure i.e. what kind of configuration did you have and what went wrong?

b3lvedere 1y ago
Oh nothing fancy i'm afraid. The WD disk it was on just died. There was no RAID of any other rebuild back then, just a single disk. Luckily we got about 80% of the pictures back via family and friends. Rebuilding that from various sources was a pain though. It taught me to use backups the hard way :)
- lossyalgo 1y ago
  I'm confused - you used FreeNAS on a single disk? I wasn't even aware that was possible. Thankfully you were able to recover! I think almost everyone has learned to make backups the hard way at some point. I am the local IT guy among a lot of friends (and by extension, their friends) and so I was always the go-to when things got bad. At some point 15+ years ago, I bought "Restorer2k" which was able to save a lot of data from not-quite-dead drives, some of had to go into the freezer overnight in ziplock bags to try and unlock a frozen read-head (rarely helped), others I was able to replace the controller via eBay. One friend lost an almost finished PhD dissertation (months of work). I remember the tears when I was able to recover that :) At some point I got tired of data recovery and started telling people to buy a Mac + cheap external drive and use the Time Machine feature. Interestingly, I haven't gotten many phone calls the last few years ;)
  - b3lvedere 1y ago
    Err yeah. There were more disks, but I wasn't that experienced, so i made Volumes/SMB shares per disk. FreeNAS itself was on a bootable USB stick. Who needs a big huge single volume eh? :) This was back in 2007 as well.