Backup Server with FreeNas

[campingtomz]

Hello everyone, 

I am kind of new to the LinusTechTips forum. I am currently in a weird situation. I used Crashplan as my backup solution for the past few years with an external raid box. Since it is being discontinued in August I started looking for a different solution. I was exploring the Nas/backup server world and I found most of the pre-built devices to be over priced and not the best hardware. I have a Home Server that I use to run Plex and my home domain. It was a test and learning machine for work. I host files movies and so on. I wanted to build a second machine that I can use as a backup machine encase of critical failure of my main server. For work we use the Datto backup solution and I find it to be a great solution for file recover and hardware failures.  I had some left-over parts and was looking at freeNas as it looked like the Datto. I am now kind of stuck on the next step. I am looking for a decent and affordable backup software for my home computers and server. I would like to be able to take full volume backups of the computers, as well as file/folder backups of others. I would like to be able to spin up in a vm, either on the FreeNas machine or my Windows server. I was looking at Acronis true image and Storage craft. I have reached out to our datto rep, but they are understandably not going to give me a copy of their OS.

so, to recap:

• Use the FreeNas device as backup solution or is there a better method
• What is the recommended Backup software
  • Volume and file backups
  • VM recovery
• Multi-computer support

 

My home network currently includes:

My freeNas machine

OS: FreeNAS-11.1-U5

CPU: I5-7500

Ram: 8 gigs:

Controller card: LSI SAS9211-8i in IT mode

Hard drives: 16 gig m.2 sata for the OS, 4 x 4tb sata drives in zraid2 

Case: Xigmatek Nebula 

 

Server:

Dell power-edge t620

Windows Server 2016

CPU: 2x E5-2620 

Ram 44 gigs

Raid card: Perc H710

Drives: 3 x 600gig Sas drives in raid 5, 3 x 4 Tb sata drives in raid 5

It is a little Hyper V host machine. I have a VM for my domain controller (DHCP active directory, plex and so on)

some other VMS for game server (minecraft and so on)

 

 

[Catsrules]

I use Veeam Endpoint for backups of physical computers (workstations). I have been very pleased with it. I just have it backup to my Freenas storage over a folder share and call it good.

 

Unfortunately I don't know of a good free backup solution for VMs on ESXI. For the moment I am just using the built in backup solutions of FreeNAS/ZFS as FreeNAS is my VM backend storage. Everything just goes to a secondary freenas box. But that is very limiting, and you can't easily spin up a clone of a VM.

 

There are free/ free versions of backup software for VMs for example Veeam. However as far as I am aware none of them work with the free version of ESXI because the free version doesn't support API calls the backup software needs to work properly. So you basically out of luck unless you buy a vSphere license. (They might have like educations version or something).

 

Edit

Oh never mind for some reason I thought you where using ESXI. Veeam backup free I believe supports Hyper V. I have never used the free version. But the but if it is anything like the Endpoint of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5. It should do an good job.

[jde3]

A NAS can be an ok backup system if you remember that a backup is 2 copies of the data. That can be the one on your desktop and the one on the NAS. If you only have the data on the NAS then it is no longer a backup.

 

This is fine for general data but you may want really important can't loose data to be offsite. (I believe FreeNAS has the ability to use Tarsnap? That would work fine for that kind of data.)

 

For Windows client backup you can use whatever you like really. Most Anti-Virus programs have a backup.. Microsoft has one that is pretty bad.. the downside to commercial backup is you often need the software to restore the backup forcing you to possibly re-buy it. One free open source backup program for windows that... I won't say it's great but it sucks less than the others.. is Duplicati. It's based on Duplicity from Unix/Linux and that is pretty good. It does automatic incremental remote encrypted backups.

 

https://www.duplicati.com/

 

[Mikensan]

I also second Veeam Windows Agent - though I backup to an external disk. I keep a majority of my critical/important data on my FreNAS server - and then I have a job to sync to a separate volume

[campingtomz]

hey guys thank you all for the replies. I went with Veeam, after playing around with the settings and figuring a few things out. It worked really well.

Again Thank you.

-Tom