Turn TrueNAS NAS into a backup

Operating Systems & Open Source
1

I am in the process of upgrading my NAS and adding an offsite backup. Since I intend to reuse the old platform of my original UnRaid NAS, I put together the offsite backup system first and is transferring all of the data there so that I don’t have my data in an unsafe state.

From here, I plan to use TrueNAS’s replication function to replicate the data to my new main NAS. How do I then turn the offsite backup machine into a backup? Do I have to wipe all the data off that machine or is there an easy way to do that?

I am using TrueNAS Scale. Both systems are currently at the same physical location.

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Create a new pool and/or dataset on the backup server and send the snapshots there. Done.

As this is for backup-only, I recommend cranking up the compression as high as possible. Like ZSTD with level 10 or higher, depending on what is reasonable for the CPU on the backup server with the expected bandwidth between the servers. You set this on the backup dataset on the backup server.
This can save entire disks on the target, depending on what data this is.

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Do yourself a favor, go out to a recycle place or look on ebay for an old LTO drive and use tapes for backup. You will save soooooooo much time. I’m doing this soon. I WISH, SEVERELY, that I had done a tape backup before my NAS drives took a dump.

But always, ALWAYS, remember.

A NAS is NOT a backup system.

The drive will cost a little because people still use them, but the tapes cost dirt. I have an HP LTO3 on SCSI, I’m still trying to figure out what to put it in, but then I could have one machine be the archive machine, and I can even airgap it, so help me.

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This is wrong. Read what @felix920506 wrote

Just because you read some things on the internet, doesn’t make this true. Replicated data on a different machine is the very definition of a backup.

And how do I update the backup every hour or day with tapes so the backup is is sync with actual data? You can’t. Very 90s style of seeing things.

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If your drives all take a dump like mine just did you have no NAS or Data at all, so what do you do then wise guy.

I legit just lost 2TB of data by NOT having a tape backup

The point of saying a NAS is NOT a backup system is both datarot and hardware failure potential. Recorded tracks VS volatile discs with lots of complicated parts that if anything fails now you gotta send it out to have a specialist work on it. Etc etc etc.

Theres reason to what I say. If its just a matter of cloning a NAS, have another NAS or get a disc shelf and keep a dump separate. But to rely on an equally failworthy server is kinda foolish.

Speaking from a sysadmin perspective. Not universal, but point to be made.

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So… An offsite backup copy, to backup the main NAS, would mean an on site, as well as an off site copy?

And with incremental ZFS send jobs, one way, one can bear the loss if either local OR remote machine, and maintain a copy?

I think OP already got thus, and is planning to keep another copy (one remote, one local)

You have an interesting point about a different media and stream/sequential/not hot tape, would be more forgiving of acidentsl user error deletion.

But as exard mentioned, OP is already planning a second copy, so I think you can rest, assured OP is working on it…

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thx

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Just about everything is wrong here

Yes, a NAS can be a backup system, and LTO will not save you any time.

It will be 100x easier to just replicate your snapshots to another TrueNAS box than messing with tapes, especially old LTO3 tapes

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The cheapest LTO drive I could find locally was a HPE LTO5 model and it cost ~100k TWD (~3200 USD). For that price I could very well make 5 more backups on SSDs or 10 more copies on HDDs. I only have 16TB of data.

I have 2 drives mirrored in each NAS machine for a total of 4 drives so I should be pretty safe.

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Yes, I am working on it. Spinning rust isn’t the fastest so it will take a few days. I just got a new network switch and 2.5Gb network cards to speed up the transfers.

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