Hello all,
I have been reading this forum for a good while now but this is my first post.
First a bit of background. I have lots of experience with desktop computers however this is my first proper foray into servers/ NAS's. I have messed around with FreeNas a little in the past but it downright frightened me with all the ECC, ZFS and "You will lose all your data" mentality of the community. I am hoping that I have been good this year and Santa will bring me a HP ProLiant Microserver Gen8 G1610T. I must first congratulate the creators of OMV and the community as I have done extensive research of many OS's (The usual suspects, Windows, FreeNas, Nas4Free, Amahi, Xpenology, Owncloud, Ubuntu Server etc.) and this is the only one that ticked all of the boxes.
I am hoping to use my Server for the following;
- Back up two windows pc's using rsync
- Back up a mac (Not too sure how yet, but this isn't so important)
- Use owncloud to back up various phones, tablets and serve data
- Stream content using Plex to Roku's and Xbox's
- Provide usb back up to external drives (Something that many OS's seem to struggle with)
(Please let me know if OMV won't in fact do any of this)
I have a question about back up implementation and what you are using to ensure back up redundancy in your system.
I understand that Raid is a perfectly good redundancy scheme however it is far from a back up, my FreeNas experience makes me want Raid 6 with 6 drives and an off site server back up but this just isn't sensible or feasible. So I am looking into something sensible for a typical home scenario.
I am a strong believe in the 3-2-1 back up principle in that you should have your main data set, an external back up and an offsite back up.
Therefore my current plan is to use the desktop computers as the main data set which is stored on there internal hard drives. Rsync this to the server so that is my on site back up. Use Microsoft Onedrive to store my most important data (family photos) and finally keep two usb hard drives in a bi weekly off site back up that is stored at my office to guard against theft or fire etc. Anything worse than this and I would probably be dead so I wouldn't care
This requires the same number of hard drives as a raid 6 (Less storage space though) however I feel that it is a far better safe guard as my application does not matter if the server is offline for a week while I re build it. I am also very familiar with the pitfalls of raid and what can go wrong during rebuilds and with hot spares. I think this shows that raid arrays aren't particularly good or necessary for home applications.
So onto my questions:
- I would like to hear what you use for your back up scheme and if you think this would provide a sensible back up implementation for home use.
- I would also like to know of any ideas or problems using OMV for my needs.
- What problems could be encountered using OMV software raids using ext4 say for example if the MB failed and I couldn't find a spare. Could I plug the drives into a Linux distro and recover the raid/ data?
- Really I'm just asking for your thoughts on this matter.
Thanks for your help,
Regards
Celurius