NAS backup catalogs

[voodoodrul]

In my current home server configuration, I use a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine as a NAS and Hyper-V host. I do nightly snapshot backups using Windows Server Backup. This gives me point-in-time recovery with basically zero effort and the catalog holds a little over 300 days of backups. I think this is a critical feature of a good backup scheme - versioning.

With that said, I want to accomplish this same feat in a consumer NAS. Most consumer NAS solutions have shoddy backup features tacked on and I've never seen versioning. I'd love it if something like the Western Digital My Cloud EX2 supported a VSS-like snapshot feature. Having an automated backup does you no good if the file you accidentally deleted on Monday was permanently lost by the backup job on Tuesday.

About the only way I can think to accomplish this with such a device is to use it as a generic iSCSI target and have something like Windows Server driving the disks, but that just makes it an external storage enclosure and adds potential corruption if the network fails.

Anyway, if someone has suggestions, I'd love to hear.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

ZFS has snapshotting, so any consumer microserver type NAS running Linux/FreeBSD with ZFS would be able to do that.

Writing some shell scripts to automate that would be easy-peasey.

 

[voodoodrul]

Indeed. I keep considering FreeNAS for numerous reasons, mostly ZFS features - deduplication, snapshots, and error correction. I might have to build my own to be happy about it, but maybe there is an ideal prebuilt hardware appliance out there. Any suggestions on a make/model?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Indeed. I keep considering FreeNAS for numerous reasons, mostly ZFS features - deduplication, snapshots, and error correction. I might have to build my own to be happy about it, but maybe there is an ideal prebuilt hardware appliance out there. Any suggestions on a make/model?

HP Microservers were pretty popular for a while.

There are a number of pedestal-style server you can get pretty cheap on eBay and load with HDDs. I'd avoid rackmount equipment for noise reasons. Lenovo's usually a decent brand. You can also repurpose an older workstation like the ones in this thread - they're generally built for 24/7 operation from server-grade-ish components, although they usually lack redundant PSUs, IPMI, and other server goodies.

I rolled my own server that works pretty well.

I'm a little gunshy about FreeNAS because the community is basically a bunch of jerks who can't quite cope with the fact that their beloved "enterprise" product is used mostly by n00b-ey home users. FreeBSD is also just... different... enough... to cause brain farts if you're used to Linux. (And god help you if you have a FreeBSD problem...)

A beginner-friendly, popular linux distro like Ubuntu and then installing ZoL (ZFS on Linux) is probably a better choice. There's always a new crop of recently converted enthusiasts willing to help the new kids, and decent, clear tutorials abound.

 

[voodoodrul]

I actually have two HP N40L Microservers, an ML10, and a Lenovo TS140. I suppose any of these are good candidates. The N40L doesn't support ECC memory, so that gives me some pause in running ZFS as I've heard of horror stories related to single bit memory errors and corruption. Memory errors crop up faster than you think in systems running 24/7. I think Google did a study and my take from it is that at least 1 bit error per month is a fact of life for most systems.

But part of this was to search for a simple turn-key consumer solution. And I like being able to restore previous versions of files using the Previous Versions tab in Windows, rather than having to follow any special procedure to mount snapshots to do a recovery, all that jazz.

FreeBSD isn't a problem, but I agree. It has to "think different" just enough to taunt someone used to the usual Linux way.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

But part of this was to search for a simple turn-key consumer solution. And I like being able to restore previous versions of files using the Previous Versions tab in Windows, rather than having to follow any special procedure to mount snapshots to do a recovery, all that jazz.

Then it'll need to run Windows, whatever it is.

If budget isn't too constraining, there are some business-oriented models that run Windows "Storage" Server.

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/seagate-nas-windows-server-r2-storage,1-1419.html

 

[gea]

But part of this was to search for a simple turn-key consumer solution. And I like being able to restore previous versions of files using the Previous Versions tab in Windows, rather than having to follow any special procedure to mount snapshots to do a recovery, all that jazz.

ZFS solutions based on NexentaStor or Oracle Solaris or its free forks OmniOS/ OpenIndiana offer ZFS snaps as Windows previous versions with full support of Windows alike nfs4 ACL and Windows SID as security reference.

NexentaStor comes with a Web-GUI. For Solaris or OmniOS you can use my napp-it.

btw
Solaris + HP Microserver is a nice combo.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Did not realize that. Sweet.