FreeNAS or Ubuntu for backups and media server

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cabous

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Hi everyone,
I posted the information / question below on askubuntu but would like a second opinion from MyBB readers. I have added more information below to make my situation / plans clearer.

I have the following setup:
HP Microserver N40L
1 x 250GB HDisk
1 x 1TB HDisk
2 x 2TB Hdisks
Ubuntu 14.10

Currently I use the server to backup the following hardware:
1 x MacBook Pro running Windows and OSX
2 x iPhones (doing backups of the photo's)

I'm running my server headless and keyboardless but have WebMin installed.

I want to safely store photo's and home video's and make the odd backup of my laptop. Initially I planned on setting up my two 2TB disks with RAID 1 but it feels like a waste of space for me (My 1TB disk is almost full and it has images + backups of 2 laptops + photo's and videos. After clearing out junk I will probably end up with about 600GB of data I want backed up).

And here is the question - would it not be better for me to set up rsync between the disks (syncing just my backups directory to at least one other disk) or something that can keep them in sync? Then I don't need to worry about RAID issues, slow write speed due to double write etc etc...

I'm thinking that I would then have more space to also set up my server as a media server.

**************

So, the suggestion was that I use FreeNAS on the MicroServer and it looks like it will do everything I would like it to. The problem for me is that I would need to upgrade the MicroServer's RAM to the required 8GB minimum and I can't justify that (+/- R1 600 spend) at this moment. Everything I mentioned above is available in Linux (backups, media server, iTunes Media Server and whatever other plans may come).

Thanks for listening :)
 
Not sure why you feel you need 8GB memory. My FreeNAS N40L is quite happy with the stock 2GB and runs torrents 60% of the time together with scheduled rsync jobs after hours and ad-hoc backups as needed.

N40L.png
 
The debate about FreeNas vs. NAS4Free vs. regular OS will probably be taken up in a healthy fashion soon by others. I will just post my own personal feelings about RAID vs. other means of data replication.

The impression is that things are moving away from RAID towards the other means of duplication. The problem is that in the typical South African home we have a very different scenario to a managed data centre. Schedules tasks for things like rsync can be disrupted at any stage due to load shedding. This is why I am using RAID 1 on a Microserver. Everything is kept synchronized in real time and it shuts down gracefully via the UPS when the power goes off. It will be interesting to hear if others here have found a better solution to these little challenges.

A couple of notes: This system suns Ubuntu 14.04, an LTS is a good idea if you don't want to set up the RAID again too often. There are 4 x 2TB disks in two RAID pairs. The performance does not seem to suffer as a result of running softraid.
 
ive been wondering about this as well. im leaning towards Ubuntu because I need to log onto work via citrix and it seems Ubuntu has a citrix plugin.
 
cabous said:
Hmm - I got my information from the FreeNAS site from the hardware requirements page. It does say that the specced system is for a few users.

I see you have version 8. Maybe the 8 GB RAM is for version 10?
Click to expand...
Could well be, here's the the almost illegible fine print:

* FreeNAS no longer supports 32-bit hardware. The last FreeNAS Release with 32-bit hardware support was FreeNAS 9.2.1.9. This release also supported the UFS filesystem. Deployments on 32-bit hardware using UFS had lower hardware requirements of a 4GB boot device and 4GB of RAM. PLEASE NOTE that further security and stability updates to the 9.2.1.x branch are not guaranteed.
Click to expand...

... just goes to show how solid a FreeNAS/N40L combo is. I think mine has been been running for over 3 years now :)
 
The recommendation for 8GB of RAM for FreeNAS / NAS4Free stems from ZFS requirements for optimal performance. If you intend to do simple mirroring (RAID1) with UFS, then you should be able to get away with 2GB RAM. I doubt you will notice any performance hit when writing data to a mirror pair.
 
I'd recommend FreeNAS and ZFS. Spend the extra on the memory.

ZFS in raidz2 is the way to go. Our current FreeNAS server at the office has multiple disks failing, 2 are already gone and it really helps knowing that there is no downtime even if I lose two disks.

You can also run ZFS on Linux, it is a lot more mature now than it was a few years ago. If your data is important to you rather don't go mdadm/softraid.
 
Ok - Thanks for all the input guys. I see the leaning is definitely towards FreeNAS. I'm going to stick with Ubuntu though - and make it work for me.

I'm tempted to get FreeNAS or unRAID but I decided to use the money on something else.
 
Don't you guys want to create a noob friendly guide for me? I want backups and a Squid proxy so I can save some bandwidth.
 
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