RAID, RSync, Greyhole or other?

Tiel · 18. Februar 2016

I'm about to build my first server with OMV for backups. I'm looking at this as an opportunity to learn about linux and servers, but I'd like to ask for some direction with my initial design. I have:

Athlon 64 X2 6000+ CPU
4GB RAM
500GB HDD as system drive
2x 5TB HDD
1x 2TB HDD (optional)

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4x Windows 10 PCs
~2TB family photos (slowly growing)
~200GB music

I would like to backup of all my photos and music, and set up automated backups of the Windows PCs to OMV (maybe with Crashplan?). I would also prefer to duplicate the backup files so that if a copy/drive fails I have another reliable copy.

If I understand it correctly I have a few options:

Setup RAID 1 on both 5TB HDDs (but I understand this is primarily meant to minimize downtime which is not my priority)
Setup Greyhole to pool the storage and make copies of my important, selected shares between drives
Use rsync or rsnapshot (or something else?) to copy data from one HDD to the other (e.g. daily)

I'll likely experiment with additional roles for for my server but my priority is the reliability of the backups. For example if the drive with all of my photos fails on my Windows machine and I should happen to discover there's also a problem with the backup drive/files on my OMV, I want to have the best chance of recovering those files from the secondary copy without having to dive deep into unfamiliar linux to do it.

What is best for my needs?

ryecoaaron · 18. Februar 2016

This is what I would do:

I wouldn't use raid. I would rsync one 5tb drive (call it D1) to the other 5tb drive (call it D2) once or twice per day with rsync in the OMV web interface.

I would create shared folders on D1 - pc_backup_1, pc_backup_2, pc_backup_3, pc_backup_4, photos, music
Use crashplan or whatever to backup each windows box to their respective pc_backup folder.

I would create shared folders on D2 - pc_backup_1b, pc_backup_2b, pc_backup_3b, pc_backup_4b, photos2, music2

I would use the rsnapshot plugin to sync the files on D1 to D2 using the following values:
pc_backup folders - 0 hourly, 2 weekly (hopefully that doesn't take too much space), 0 monthly, 0 yearly
photos - use default values
music - use default values

Only setup samba shares for the shared folders on D1. Do not share the anything on D2. This will protect you from nasty thing viruses like cryptolocker. You will have multiple copies of the files easily accessible if something bad happens and will be ultra stable.

Not sure what to do with the 2tb. You could pool it with D1 but then D2 wouldn't be large enough to backup to. You could store data on it that isn't critical.

I have used a similar setup for years like this.

Tiel · 19. Februar 2016

That's exactly what I was looking for, and these specifics were a great help, thank you.

I couldn't get Crashplan to see my shares, even installing it "just for me" on Win10 and mapping a drive per the unofficial workaround from Code42. Wasted a lot of time with that and then decided to try Veeam Endpoint Backup Free instead. That software backs up to the network location perfectly.

Thanks again.

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