Your inputs in this thread, and the original thread about RAID, have been very helpful to me.
I have been using backblaze for years; it's very similar to crashplan. I know it does not back up changed files immediately; it is possible that crashplan is closer to real time backup, but I'm not certain.
But if I'm not mistaken, a mundane file or folder request does not send a Wake On LAN (WOL) request using a magic packet etc. Or can it? If WOL is the way one brings the OMV nas back to life, I could live with having to issue a WOL request.
Anyone have any ideas why the drives were never spinning down?
Thanks David. Is the bios setting WOL? Or is it usually named something else? It's an asus motherboard from 2006 or so.
I am thinking that the nas will only be used a few times a day; and I think 'at random' so I will probably forget about the rtcwake option, which would wake it up at a specified time (I guess, didn't try it).
So I need the autoshutdown to kick in after no activity for x minutes; that seemed to work. David wrote that WOL might be needed in order wake it up. That might be tricky...while it is possible that the backup software or other software could issue a magic packet before the scheduled backup, I'm not sure what to do when simply trying to access the NAS via windows explorer for archived files etc. Is there any way to configure OMV to wake up on that kind of file request? If not, maybe it'd be ok to simply issue a manual wake up cmd before attempted to browse the NAS contents.
I tried to get OMV to have the hdd sleep but they never have. I have read a couple of threads on that topic here. I tossed the ext4 file system and replaced it with an xfs file system. I enabled option "1 - Minimum power usage with standby (spindown)" for APM; also set spindown to 5 minutes on all 4 of the raided drives; they never did a spindown. Any clues on this? I had logged out of the web ui to omv, and nothing was open in a share.
ryecoaaron, when you wrote
"rsnapshot is a plugin as well. It runs on the server to make multiple hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups. It saves space by linking to the existing copies if they have not changed"
Is the 'server' the OMV NAS? Or a regular linux etc server (not just a storage device). I think you mean a regular server...and from what little I've read, rsnapshot copies files etc in almost realtime. Maybe that's what tekkb is using for his continuous backup?
And tekkb, what are you using for continuous backup? And in the other thread you say "I have a 2nd server and make backups of each data drive", can you be more explicit? Your server #1 is in use not as a backup device but as a production server of some sort; and you back it up to a second server? And the #2 is an OMV NAS?
I'm trying to get a sense of what others that have been around longer than I in the NAS space are doing.
The time to rebuild large capacity hdd and the seemingly increasing rate of failure is also why I'm going a bit cold on raid...but warming up to multiple, independent backup locations.
Thanks again for that input. Since I'm new to all of this (nas, omv) it may be a bit much for me to venture into snapraid. Why do you choose it over the raid that is built in to OMV? Or is it more of a complimentary management enhancement to the OMV RAID, and not a replacement? I also have not heard of rsnapshot, but it seems it's linux etc not windows and windows is where my work takes place. I may be able to find something parallel in the windows world.
It just says resyncing (81% right now). I have no idea why...OMV has been installed for a week, and the NAS was off for 4 days straight.
Yeah, I think the two posters in the other thread and you and I agree that RAID has it's place. I have work servers that run on raid arrays and it'd be crazy not to do that.
I'm sure you're far more experienced than I am with RAID. I had never even heard of snapraid until now - it's not something on uses with OMV, correct? It's more like something one might use on a linux workstation or server?
"Everyone should have a backup" we all agree on that also. The thing is, with my OMV NAS I was planning on having my backups stored on a RAID array...so the backup is dependent on my management of the raid array.
I am probably in a middle ground where I am familiar with the various risks and solutions to some degree, but not really wise in these areas. What I'd worry about with a RAID-less NAS is any data that exists in that one location is lost. If I have two NAS both non-raid then I could have a backup of the backup. I'm not sure what is best.
BTW you said 'is running without raid a risk' ' not if you have backup' but I don't think that can be exactly true. You'd be good as far as your most recent backup goes. That's what I have counted on from RAID - a single disk going south does not mean a loss of a days work.
I am interested in hearing whatever else anyone has to say on this. This was my first RAID 10 experience; I was very surprised to see it rebuilding already...I don't get that.
I saw the "thoughts on RAID" thread and apparently can't comment there. But I resonated with the perspectives presented there and have questions.
I'm an independent software dev and have had RAID 1 running on my main workstation for years (windows 7, intel software raid). I've wanted RAID because if a disk dies I have a working machine and just need to rebuilt the array with a new participant disk. It has been a good premis.
OTOH I have found that with my very intermittent 'hands on' with RAID config, it can be dicey whenever I do need to deal with RAID issues. From this angle, RAID introduces risk. Also, if my machine crashes (bsod kind of things) the RAID array rebuild time is hard to live through (two 1.5 TB disks), as it consumes a lot of RAM and cpu cycles.
I've started to think I'll go RAID-less on my next workstation. SSD (which I have never touched to date) are getting big enough and are apparently less likely to fail than spindle drives. I have not figured out whether it'd be safe enough to trust the SSD to the degree that I could drop raid, but I hope I can work it out. Backups have to be regular and tested, of course.
I'm a new OMV user and today I started the machine up for the first time in almost a week. I had created a RAID 10 array (4 - 4 TB disks) thinking speed and resilience, and that a NAS would have few crashes and that rebuilts would be rare. But I see that for some reason my array is resyncing...I guess that means rebuilding the array. This and the 'thoughts about raid' thread and my own cautions about RAID have me wondering if I ought to forgo RAID on the NAS and take another route to ensure durability of the data stored on the NAS.
If I don't use RAID on the NAS and a disk fails and that's my only copy of the data then I'd be bummed. The OMV non-RAIDers out there must have the same concerns. So what do you do? You have two NAS units?
Autoshutdown isn't working as I expected. I left the default IP range of 2..254 alone at first and it never shut down; one pc was on all night maybe that's why? I cleared the IP range and set the interval to 1 cycle and it did shut down (tips from other threads); but starting the web ui and attempting to reach the storage folder via windows explorer don't make it wake up. I can see from the other threads that this topic can be complex.
I don't even know if autoshutdown can do what I want, which is to put the server into a sleep like state when it's not been actively used as a network resource for x period, and to wake up when a device needs access to the folders it hosts.
For now a simple on a at 8 pm off at 11 pm would do it. I will check to see if there is a feature like that in the mobo bios. I didn't see anything like that in omv, but maybe I missed it. I will continue reading about autoshutdown.
Excellent, thank you. For any other newb that runs into this, the omv-extras plugin sprinkles some new plugins into omv.
I had found the "upload" button on the plugin pages kind of strange, thinking I new it's intent but that it should be 'download' instead. But upload makes more sense...from the web ui to omv, the action is in fact an upload to the omv server. I'm not 'on' the omv server.
I'm testing autoshutdown now. I enabled and left everything else with default values. Does it mean that the omv server won't autoshutdown until all devices on the network are off? Or is it more like if the OMV server is not reached out to from any of those devices for the interval, it will shutdown?
What's the diff between hibernation and suspension anyways...I've never know, I imagine it's a matter of degree?
OK, thanks.
This stuff is all new to me. There are a lot of things I don't understand, for example on the page http://phpbb.openmediavault.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1289 which is apparently a or the plugin listing page, all point to .4 or .5, and I have 1.9. I went to the github page for autoshutdown and it's basically greek to me.
Anyways unless someone feels a dire need to lead me around what must be obvious to more experienced users, I'll probably figure it out on my own.
I am totally impressed by omv. The featureset is awesome; the UI is very clean and well ordered. Thanks to all of you who contributed!
I hadn't seen the standby setting in power management. It worked, but I could not wake the machine by attempting to access the storage hdd on the server, it took a keyboard bump to get it to wake up.
Where are the docs for OMV? The documentation page here does not seem to have any content? http://docs.openmediavault.org/index.html
My omv test box is only used once a day as a backup repository. I'd like it to save power by turning itself off or powering down to some idle state for most of the day.
What I could find on this pointed me to the hdd spindown feature. I when to physical disks, edit, and set disk spindown to 5 min, for each of the 4 data disks (in raid 10). They're not spinning down. I don't have APM enabled for those drives - do I need to do that?
Is there a 'machine sleep' setting in omv? That's be even better than drive spinning down. For this test, I'm repurposing an older mobo and cpu and they're kind of power hogs in comparison to newer units. If this all works out as well as it seems to be, I'll migrate the setup to a new box with more spartan power req.
Thanks
Aha - thank you, it worked, there is an ip address in fact.
I would like to test omv and started with openmediavault_1.9_amd64.iso
The installation seemed to go well, but I think the network is not right. After booting there is a message "No interface(s) available". I believe it should be presenting an IP address which I could browse to for the web based gui. I rebooted and it stayed the same.
During my first installation when it asked for domain name the default value it suggested was "T-mobile.com". My router is from t-mobile but I don't regard it as a proper domain so I use AT at the domain name, which is the workgroup name I use for some of my pcs. When I saw the "no interfaces available" message I figured I had made a mistake with that so I reinstalled (not knowing the commands to change the domain name). This time the default value presented was "local", which I'd seen in some omv walkthroughs as an acceptable value, so I kept it. But it's still the same thing - no interface available. I'm about to try reinstalling and using "T-mobile.com" and hope it works, but kind of expect it to fail at this point...so thought I' ask here.
And sure enough reinstalling with "T-mobile.com" for the domain still results in "no interfaces available".
