Qnap TS-251+ repurpose - a couple of questions - new to OMV

  • Hello all,


    new guy here. I am trying to get my digital life together and organized with my backups and home data storage as I am lacking in a lot of ways currently and looking at OMV. It'd be used as a shared drive between some windows and linux devices (have been thinking about getting my first mac soon as well) where those devices might have like a folder specific to that device that it would like to sync between the network drive. I'm concerned about data integrity as I've had disks before get partially corrupted and want warnings/monitoring of this if possible.


    I have a Qnap TS-251+ that I got that was not being used. It is a 2 disk nas device


    I'd like to upgrade the DOM and install OMV - I think I've read that being done from some google-fu as its pretty much just a x86 intel PC. I have to figure out where to get a usb DOM module but I think once I do it will be ok. If anyone has done something like this with a similar QNAP and wants to warn me not to, i'm all ears.


    I want to ditch the qnap OS, it's goofy to me and the security seems to be....uh, how do we say....whack.


    I would like this device to be my home NAS. I don't really go crazy with movies or whatever, more just like document organization, photos, important files, and backup OS images. I don't plan to expose it to the internet currently, but that might change and I would look to use something like zerotier for this, but i'd more likely want to setup something like an raspberry pi where just what I need to be available widely is synced to the specific portion of the nas and expose that through vpn or soemthing.


    ok, my OMV setup questions:


    I would like the disks to just be mirrors of each other. Don't really need raid, but just want dumb mirrored disk in case a drive dies. What would be the preferred way to set this up so that the drives are just mirrors and what is the recovery process like to "rebuild" the setup if one of the disks craps itself.


    disk encryption? - is it worth it, i'm curious about setting this up, my other home NAS experience has been with setups wher eyou can pull the disk and copy stuff off if needed. I'm assuming this makes recovering anything in case of failure harder. Is there a reliable way to have your data encrypted, but not "destabilize" your backup setup. maybe some like veracrypt container or soemthing?


    off site - I'm interested in setting up an offsite auto backup of my stuff, I was thinking about using zerotier with a trusted friend/family member. for a paid service are there any encrypted at rest kinda zero knowledge cloud backup solutions that have easy integration with OMV? such as sync.com or similar? I don't like the idea of cloud storage that can scan through tax documents or whatever else


    simple device image backups - I've been lax about this and am not backed up like I should be. I was thinking of something like URbackup to have the different machines at home backedup, even like rpi's and stuff I use around the house for various things. I'd like it kinda set-and-forget and just knowing that I'll have an image backed up nightly in an iterative manner ready to go if one of my machines disks bites the dust.


    bonus- backing up OMV install image incase OS drive dies - does OMV support this?


    I guess I'm looking for some advice on whole home backup best practices using OMV with my data being private and safe from hardware failure locally and usefully and easily accessed between devices on my home network.


    Sorry for the novel, thanks for reading this far. Any tips or advice are appreciated.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I would like the disks to just be mirrors of each other. Don't really need raid, but just want dumb mirrored disk in case a drive dies. What would be the preferred way to set this up so that the drives are just mirrors and what is the recovery process like to "rebuild" the setup if one of the disks craps itself.

    Use rsync (with or without "delete" option) or rsnapshot do benefit from snapshots. I use rsnapshot. There is a plugin for that.
    You can search the internet on how rsnapshot works. It is a standard linux tool.

    disk encryption? - is it worth it, i'm curious about setting this up, my other home NAS experience has been with setups wher eyou can pull the disk and copy stuff off if needed. I'm assuming this makes recovering anything in case of failure harder. Is there a reliable way to have your data encrypted, but not "destabilize" your backup setup. maybe some like veracrypt container or soemthing?

    There is a LUKS encryption plugin. With this you can encrypt a complete filesystem.
    Disadvatage: after a reboot you have to enter the key in the GUI of OMV to unlock the device.

    off site - I'm interested in setting up an offsite auto backup of my stuff, I was thinking about using zerotier with a trusted friend/family member. for a paid service are there any encrypted at rest kinda zero knowledge cloud backup solutions that have easy integration with OMV? such as sync.com or similar? I don't like the idea of cloud storage that can scan through tax documents or whatever else

    I use Duplicati for that. There is a plugin for this.

    simple device image backups - I've been lax about this and am not backed up like I should be. I was thinking of something like URbackup to have the different machines at home backedup, even like rpi's and stuff I use around the house for various things. I'd like it kinda set-and-forget and just knowing that I'll have an image backed up nightly in an iterative manner ready to go if one of my machines disks bites the dust.

    I use UrBackup for this. For me it a great tool. Users don't even realize that a backup is running in the background.

    bonus- backing up OMV install image incase OS drive dies - does OMV support this?

    Backing up of a live system has some limitations. But there is a backup plugin for OMV.
    Alternative is making clones of the OS drive with Clonezilla before and/or after a major change.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I would like the disks to just be mirrors of each other. Don't really need raid, but just want dumb mirrored disk in case a drive dies. What would be the preferred way to set this up so that the drives are just mirrors and what is the recovery process like to "rebuild" the setup if one of the disks craps itself.

    I'm using Rsync, for full disk sync, on one server. The command line to set up Rsync disk-to-disk replication is in this guide, on page 64 (in the current version). Restoration to the backup drive is a matter of repointing a shared folder to the second drive. (Also in the guide.)


    disk encryption? - is it worth it, i'm curious about setting this up, my other home NAS experience has been with setups wher eyou can pull the disk and copy stuff off if needed. I'm assuming this makes recovering anything in case of failure harder. Is there a reliable way to have your data encrypted, but not "destabilize" your backup setup.

    Outside of a work environment where, if a physical hard drive is stolen, sensitive data or proprietary trade secrets are compromised, I can't see value in drive encryption. Most compromises will come over the network, where drive encryption is of no consequence. For the reasons you stated, repair, recovery, etc., encryption adds complexities that can make it hard to deal with. (But that's just my humble opinion.)


    simple device image backups - I've been lax about this and am not backed up like I should be. I was thinking of something like URbackup to have the different machines at home backedup, even like rpi's and stuff I use around the house for various things. I'd like it kinda set-and-forget and just knowing that I'll have an image backed up nightly in an iterative manner ready to go if one of my machines disks bites the dust.

    I use UrbackUp and have found it to be excellent. I've tested full bare metal restores and they were a breeze. As @macom has mentioned, it runs in the background with little to no detectable impact on a Windows client. R-PI's, other ARM devices, and Linux clients are another matter. It's easier to clone an R-PI's SD-card off-line. Linux backups, with Urbackup, were limited to the /home folder, or partition, of the client (At least, that was the way it seemed when I tested it awhile back. I didn't test the Linux command line version of the client connector.)

    bonus- backing up OMV install image incase OS drive dies - does OMV support this?

    There's plenty of support for this in the GUI, using OMVExtra's, to include a one time bootup into clonzilla with SSH access for headless servers.


    On the other hand, I've been using USB thumbdrives to boot my servers for one reason - it's a breeze to clone them, meaning OS backup and restoration is dirt simple.
    Your particular model of QNAP (TS251) has an Intel processor and BIOS. If it can be configured to boot from USB, you might consider booting from USB Thumbdrives. More information on setting up Thumbdrives, as boot drives, cloning them, etc., is also in the guide.

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