Backup options between Windows Server & FreeNas?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Gerr said:

I don't know Linux, so thought FreeNAS would be a simple server to setup.  I really like the sound of ZFS and multiple co-workers recommended it, so really looking for a distro that has that.

if you want it simple, just install windows server on the hardware, and use storage spaces(most of the same features as zfs) and then run all the services you need

[Gerr]

I thought Windows Storage Spaces was far inferior to ZFS and generally a pain?

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, Gerr said:

I thought Windows Storage Spaces was far inferior to ZFS and generally a pain?

not on windows server. You get all the same checksumming and snapshots and pooling.  I make a single large storage pool with all the drives.

[Gerr]

My issue is I want several small pools, not one giant pool as I have purchased different drive types based on use.

 

WD Purple - designed for NVR recordings.

WD Red - slow NAS drives, good for backups & client files/folders.

HGST NAS - higher speed NAS drives, good for media streaming.

 

I really don't want to mix them.  And I want more than simple mirroring on my media storage, I want something like Raid5 so I can use the space of 2 of 3 drives.

[Electronics Wizardy]

28 minutes ago, Gerr said:

My issue is I want several small pools, not one giant pool as I have purchased different drive types based on use.

 

WD Purple - designed for NVR recordings.

WD Red - slow NAS drives, good for backups & client files/folders.

HGST NAS - higher speed NAS drives, good for media streaming.

 

I really don't want to mix them.  And I want more than simple mirroring on my media storage, I want something like Raid5 so I can use the space of 2 of 3 drives.

you can use parity in storage spaces.

 

Id make a single pool so you get the most from your storage, and you don't need the extra iops, so a single pool will be fine, you will also get about the same iops with the pool. Speeds will be fine.

[leadeater]

15 hours ago, Gerr said:

My issue is I want several small pools, not one giant pool as I have purchased different drive types based on use.

 

WD Purple - designed for NVR recordings.

WD Red - slow NAS drives, good for backups & client files/folders.

HGST NAS - higher speed NAS drives, good for media streaming.

 

I really don't want to mix them.  And I want more than simple mirroring on my media storage, I want something like Raid5 so I can use the space of 2 of 3 drives.

Storage Spaces allows you to use differing sized disks in the same pool, also remember a pool is just a pool. You have to create virtual disks inside the pool and this is the important stuff, not the pool. Also you want more disks in a single pool rather than splitting them, performance and configuration flexibility, this also applies to ZFS.

 

On Windows Server you actually have very good control of how Storage Spaces works using PowerShell. There are some important concepts you need to be aware of, more than I'm willing to cover right now . I'll cover some basics but research is heavily advised.

 

Storage Pool = Collection of disks

Storage Tier = A group of similar disks in a pool, you can create these yourself.

Virtual Disk = Usable storage container, this is where you set resiliency type and the Storage Tier(s) to use for it.

 

As you can see with the above 3 things I just gave a quick definition to for you if you are going to use Storage Spaces there is no reason not to put all your disks in the same pool. If you want a virtual disk to only live on a subset of disks you can do that, you can even have a virtual disk tier itself over multiple subsets of disks so you can have a faster cache using two-way mirror and then a slower tier using single/dual parity.

 

All the data resiliency features that are equivalent to ZFS are actually in the ReFS filesystem not actually in Storage Spaces, you would use ReFS + Storage Space.

[leadeater]

However do keep in mind a straight parity virtual disk in Storage Spaces performs like crap, you really need to use SSDs to cache (journal) or use Storage Tiers to write data first to a mirror configuration of either HDDs or SSDs.

 

FreeNAS may still be a better fit. To get the best experience out of Storage Spaces you have to do some very careful planning first and have all the correct hardware, get it wrong and it sucks big time.

[Mikensan]

Not much reason to backup the Plex jail as it only houses the application not your movies etc.. However if you want to then you just create a snapshot schedule for the dataset that plex lives in. When you create a jail, it creates a dedicated dataset for each jail. Those are the files you'd backup.