Help with my TrueNAS offsite backup strategy

Hardware Hub Storage
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For this reason, one of my dreams is the existence of a data carrier with very large capacity, high reliability and extremely low price, at the same time with small physical dimensions and low weight and optimal interface speed.

In other words, a 100TB+ ssd/hdd drive for $50. :slight_smile:

Or a 100TB+ sd card for $50 capable of reasonable transfers. :slight_smile:
In that case, a commercial service could be created, such as send me your card and I will store it safely and when you need it, I will send it to you. :slight_smile:

But I doubt I will live to see that day.

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@charles7 @Kebba You both raise good points. If the initial copy happens locally, I doubt I’ll be outpacing a 24/7 attached reasonable (40mbps) upload. New data originating on the source NAS will likely come in batches, with weeks in-between. So there should be plenty of time for the last batch to have finished before I’m thinking about another. Hare and the tortoise type thinking.

Hahaha, this is so true it hurts :joy: It would be system full of good intentions that’s for sure, with far to infrequent syncs.

I think its time to phone a friend and kickstart this data syndicate.

I’ve definitely been keen on this idea for long term storage! Might be a topic for another post, but just wished the drives were a bit cheaper. Could go for an LTO-6 maybe? Was trying to find places that would let you rent the drive, so its just time on the drive + fresh tape in cost.

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shit
omitted the line, that is my data recovery rate

It’s much cheaper to protect data on an ongoing basis, than to buy me a new motorcycle to recover your lost array.

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Two additional benefits of backing up to an off-site ZFS based NAS that I didn’t mention previously: cost & ease of restore with ZFS snapshots. Most cloud backup strategies do not offer the ease of restore functionality that ZFS Snapshots offer. Given the reduced cost and the easier restore, I view the offsite TrueNAS to be a no-brainer.

Cost Comparision: Offsite TrueNAS vs Backblaze B2 Cloud Backup

Offsite TrueNAS

  1. I opted for an old Dell desktop I found on eBay for less than $100.
  2. HDDs can often be found for about $15 per TB. I’ll estimate 5 year life, though in practice, all mine have lasted longer.
  3. I’ll assume for simplicity sake 50% storage efficiency. I.e. your vdev setup is mirrored pairs. Again, this is perhaps unlikley for a backup system, but I prefer to estimate for the worst and hope for the best.
  4. $100 for PC, $15/TB HDD cost * 60 TB raw storage = 900. $1,000 system cost. Works out to $200 per year or $17 per month assuming 5 year life. Again, I’d predict it will last longer, but I’ll assume low case.

BackBlaze B2

$6 / TB / Month * 30 TB = $180 / month

Cost difference between offsite NAS and cloud backup is staggering.

FWIW, I do use B2 in addition to my off-site NAS. I use it as a 2nd backup for a small portion of my most important data.

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It is from experience. My Dad had an old “Stora” NAS from Netgear with RAID 1, manually synced periodically to an external HDD that was stored at his work. The RAID had something bad happen (can’t remember what it was) so they backup was needed. The latest sync was almost three years old… That NAS was the storage for Photos, Documents, everything.

Luckily I managed to salvage the RAID and transfer him to a FreeNAS system that syncs to me every 15 minutes instead. A teachable moment, luckily just a close call without any actual dataloss

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