<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">And make sure you get alerts when something fails.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">There are a number of commercial NAS like Synology out there if you don't want to build it yourself.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">I'd also add some kind of offsite storage. If you have decent internet speed, cloud storage is a good choice.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">Something with error correction is also good.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">What I do:</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">I have the OS on its own disk. I've done RAID in the past, but I'm ok with rebuilding the OS. A failed drive == forced upgrade. For home, I'm ok with this for heat/electricity costs.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">For data, I've been using ZFS on Solaris -> OpenSolaris -> Ubuntu, I think 15+ years. I'm very happy with it.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">I've used as low as 1GB, but more is better. Dual core with 4GB is enough for a home system IMO</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">If you've ever used a NetApp, it is similar.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">It has snapshots that can persist forever. My system takes one every hour, day, week, month and keeps them for some multiple of that time.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">You can divide the pool into "partitions" with changing size limits (quota). </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">RAID is part of the FS. mirrors, stripes and a raid5 like raidz. Also variants that can survive the failure of 2 drives ( raidz2 ~ raid6 and triple mirrors)</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">Error detection. If there is an error, the FS stops writing to prevent more. It's a bad idea to run ZFS on single drives.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">If you have RAID, the FS has another copy to reference and can self heal the error.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">It has compression built in with negligible performance hit.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">It has dedup. Don't use it IMO. Maybe if you have infinite RAM.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">You can't expand the pool by adding disks. So a 3 disk RAIDZ can't be expanded by adding a 4th.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">You can replace/rebuild disks with larger disks to increase the pool size. It works well.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">I create mirrors. When I need more space, I add another mirror with newer drives.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">Fewer spinning drives means less electricity used if that's a big issue.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">The family uses samba, NFS or the web server to get to data. SFTP also works. They don't have to care about the disks underneath unless they fill up the share. Then it's a quick quota change and ask them to pare down how many copies of that CD they really need.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">In the past I used Crashplan for offsite. They no longer offer the unlimited systems for personal use, but I think a single system with unlimited space is available.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">Snapshots cover: Oops! I deleted it by accident, can I get it back? Well, except for deleting a "partition" or pool.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">Off site covers: Oops! The house burned down, where are the family photos.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Mar 8, 2021 at 10:00 PM <<a href="mailto:jonhall80@comcast.net">jonhall80@comcast.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
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<span style="font-family:helvetica;font-size:12pt">I forgot one thing:<br><br></span>Set up a shell script to do a simple diagnostic on both systems to detect a failed or failing system. Run two or three times a day.
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<br>md
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On 03/08/2021 9:56 PM <a href="mailto:jonhall80@comcast.net" target="_blank">jonhall80@comcast.net</a> wrote:
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<span style="font-family:helvetica;font-size:12pt">I will suggest something and let people rip it apart:<br><br></span>Get two RPis that have at least USB 2.0 Attach two large capacity disks to each one in a RAID-1 configuration (also known as "mirroring") to keep it simple. If one disk fails the other will still keep working (but you should replace it as soon as possible).
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<br>Put all of your data on both systems.
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<br>Take one of your systems to a friends or relatives house who you trust that has relatively good WiFi. Make sure the friend is relatively close, but is not in the same flood plain or fire area you are.
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<br>Do an rsync every night to keep them in sync.
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<br>Help your friend/relative do the same thing, keeping a copy of their data in your house. If your disks are big enough you could share systems and disks.
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<br>Use encryption as you wish.
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<br>Disk failure? Replace the disk and the data will be replicated.
<br>Fire, theft, earthquake? Take the replaced system over to your friends/relatives and copy the data at high speed, then take the copied system back to your house and start using it again.
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<br>You would need three disks to fail at relatively the same time to lose your data. Or an asteroid crashing that wipes out all life on the planet. Unlikely.
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<br>Realize that nothing is forever.
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<br>md
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On 03/08/2021 7:33 PM Bruce Labitt <<a href="mailto:bdlabitt@gmail.com" target="_blank">bdlabitt@gmail.com</a>> wrote:
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For the second time in 3 months I have had a computer failure. Oddly, it was a PS on the motherboard both times. (Two different MB's.) Fortunately the disks were ok. I'm living on borrowed time. Next time, I may not be that lucky.
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Need a file server system with some sort of RAID redundancy. I want to backup 2 main computers, plus photos. Maybe this RPI4 too, since that's what I'm running on, due to the second failure. If this SSD goes, I'm gonna be a sad puppy. This is for home use, so we are not talking Exabytes. I'm thinking about 2-4TB of RAID. Unless of course, RAID is obsolete these days. Honestly, I find some of the levels of RAID confusing. I want something that will survive a disk failure (or two) out of the array. Have any ideas, or can you point me to some place that discusses this somewhat intelligently?
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Are there reasonable systems that one can put together oneself these days? Can I repurpose an older PC for this purpose? Or an RPI4? What are the gotchas of going this way?
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I want to be able to set up a daily rsync or equivalent so we will lose as little as possible. At the moment, I'm not thinking about surviving fire or disaster. Maybe I should, but I suspect the costs balloon considerably. I do not want to backup to the cloud because, plain and simple, I don't trust it to be fully secure.
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Thanks for any and all suggestions.
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