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I use and highly recommend a backup product called Macrium Reflect. I believe they're UK based.
My backups are locally taken to hard drive, and I do have the process automated. I don't take them offsite. Yet.
Talking about these free Special Editions of Acronis TrueImage:
http://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/savvio-15k/discwizard-master-dl/
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&type=download&lang=de
First link is if you have at least one Seagate or Maxtor harddisk attached to your PC (internal or external), second link is same if you have Western Digital (WD) harddisk. You can simply try if you don't know what brand(s) you have, if it doesn't find specific harddisk brand program will tell you and not fully work. The Seagate version seems to be very new update, older links from google don't work anymore and version number went up since my last month download, don't know about WD version as I don't have WD in desktop PCs.
While I don't know how this will fit in with the way you will be backing things up, if you are truly paranoid you might wish to consider doing something to verify your backup after it has completed. I use ExamDiff Pro to do a byte-by-byte comparison of the original and resulting copy of whatever I'm backing up. While it is very rare, I have found that a simple copy that appeared to work has actually failed to correctly copy things in the past, for example silently changing a file by a single byte, which could be minor corruption for some files but much worse in, say, an executable. Deleting the bad resulting copy and doing it again resolved the issue, but had I not checked, I would never have been able to avoid that, and would likely have been wondering farther in the future why something wasn't working right anymore and unable to recover due to not even knowing what the problem was and no longer having the original file even if I could identify what the problem was.
Like with the other solutions mentioned here, or does it have special features?
That might come in handy :)
Though maybe it is already in the acronis software?
Got the little fellar installed with freenas :D
Everything seems to work fine & i can access it over the network, still need to install the HDD though (freenas is on a usb). I'll prolly do that during the weekend when i got some free time.
Good thing I tracked the package caus i needed to upgrade the bios, which required the serial number and the country, which as it turns out was Spain.
I got a wireless usb network card, can i use that in the microserver to connect to the network? ATM it is using a cable, which well requires a cable and thus limits where i can place the microserver.
I'm using all WD HDD. the one i got for the microserver is a WD 4tb green. When i have the hdd installed i'll be able to look into the software some more :)
I did not check, but probably not. The OS need to have drivers for that USB device and I don't think FreeNAS has support for USB wireless sticks. You can still use a wireless access point for connecting the server, some routers can be set to such mode too (I use an older, additional AVM fritz.box router for similar setup with non-wireless media player). Personally I'd recommend wired connections with gigabit switch between MicrosServer and PC for full speed.
PS: What bios version did you update to ? I did not yet register at HP, so I don't know what is current bios version and if I need the update.
I did not check, but probably not. The OS need to have drivers for that USB device and I don't think FreeNAS has support for USB wireless sticks. You can still use a wireless access point for connecting the server, some routers can be set to such mode too (I use an older, additional AVM fritz.box router for similar setup with non-wireless media player). Personally I'd recommend wired connections with gigabit switch between MicrosServer and PC for full speed.
PS: What bios version did you update to ? I did not yet register at HP, so I don't know what is current bios version and if I need the update.
They list the bios version as dates. The original on the microserver was something 2011 and the one on the site is 10/01/2013. Though if everything works i wouldn't bother as it is a bit of a pita to do. I only did it caus there was a note in the box that said to do it.
Some bumps on the road. Tried to setup UFS Volumes since that is what they recommend for low ram systems. But for some reason it will no longer aquire an IP address. Anyhow, after some fiddeling I found that the ZFS Volumes do work and now the harddrives show up on my network.
Don't know how to setup users though. Is there a simple guide somewhere to create users with different access capabilities?
I'd like to setup an account for me so i can basically do whatever i want (create files and folders on the hd, open files, ...)
And then create a folder on a hd where guest can download and upload stuff to.
Is there a way to do that?
...and i need to be able to write backups too of course :)
I had to switch my FreeNAS from german to english user interface so that I know how the menu is translated ^^
There are probably many ways to do what you ask for, but I will tell how I did it (you don't need to touch the group or user settings I don't mention here):
1. Account > Groups > Add Group > name it like 'private' or 'public'
2. Account > Users > Add user > on that frame name the user, turn off 'create a new primary group..', choose the group you set up before, set home directory to 'nonexistent' or give user his own one (I use nonexistent), set permissions for home directory if you want others to read etc, full name, email, password should be self-explanatory, finally select additional groups user should be in (e.g. public)
Note: When creating a new user using your WIndows user and password should give you auto login to your shares later (I think).
Now you have a new user, but still will not see any folder on FreeNAS, but the group(s) and user(s) are needed for permission system on shares later.
I'll reply to the rest tomorrow as it's just too late now, sorry. In short you then will create a ZFS Dataset in the ZFS volume you already have, set user and/or group permissions for that dataset and then inside the dataset add Sharing > Windows (CIFS) Shares > Add.. , these will show up as your main folders in Windows then. With correct permission settings you then can do anything within that folders from Windows.
Got the users set up for cifs. This won't get access through the internet i think though, but that is not a priority. I'll look into that later when i got the home network working properly.
So I've been able to write on the server. I have some questions about the speed though:
(my computer connects with the router through wifi, the server is connected with a cable to the router)
1. For a large file the transfer rate is 4-5 Mb/sec. This is about the same as my internet connection, but shouldn't i be able to get much higher speeds on a home network? My wifi card in my computer says it can handle 150Mb/sec. Also I still have the wireless usb that should be able to go to 300 Mb/sec. Is it worth using the USB then?
2. For lots of small files the transfer rate drops to 500Kb/sec. (At least I think it is because of it being lots of small files, that's about the only difference i can think of.) Anyway, is this bcause of the available ram (4Gb) on my system and me using that zfs volume system? Or will i get a higher transfer rate if i add another 4Gb of RAM? I still got one slot free.
Forget about the 4GB RAM and ZFS doubts, that's more than enough as you're not running a network with dozens of users ;)
I was never concerned about network speeds from the MicroServer, as it just felt good, so I did not test until now. I run 4x3GB WD Red HDD in the box and there are 3 PC attached to the net, 2 of them via cable and 1GB network ports on my router, 1 via internal WLAN 300GBit as I have no more ports on my router. My HDDs are all encrypted what is known to cost a lot of speed when it comes to writing data to them, same for HDDs in FreeNAS server (using new ZFS encryption). The MicroServer model is the same 4GB model you have, just with additional optical drive.
As I had still one empty hdd installed, I changed that one to unencrypted device, to get comparable results with yours. Compression is default (lz4). Transfer rates for large files from Core2Duo via 1GBit network cable to the Microserver are about 90MB/s (zip) to 95MB/s (iso), writing files even goes up to 100MB/s (zip), though processor might still try to compress files with lz4. This is about the maximum you can expect with 1Gbit network connections.
When using the encrypted ZFS drives in the MicroServer, for large files I get about 65MB/s when reading and 60MB/s when writing to the server, so that's perfectly fine for what I'd expect for encrypted devices (similar to what TrueCrypt does).
If I read/write a lot of small files the transfer rates go down a lot, but it depends a lot of what files, how good they compress and how many are in each folder - still it's what I'd expected in the 10-20MB/s range as average.
I then did a final test with the i7 that is connected via 300MBit WLAN (connects with 270MBit), and the results are far lower than via cable. For large files I have an average of ~ 10-12MB/s here, and 5-10MB/s for lots of small files.
So you can see it's definitely not a problem with the MicroServer, as mine comes close to the maximum possible via LAN (for 1GBit network this theoretically is ~ 125MB/s, but 90-100MB/s is realistic for fast devices as there is some overhead from protocols etc).
When I test same large files from my smaller AMD 1.6GHz PC instead the Core2Duo, the results are only about half from above (50-60MB/s), so the processor speed from your PC might be a factor too, though my PCs harddisks are encrypted too, so the processor needs to calculate a lot more here.
If your router or switch only supports 100MBit instead of 1GBit connections, I'd expect the transfer rates to drop to about half from mine above, a GBit switch should help to get rid of that bottleneck then (if your router supports Gbit check if the ports are set to 1000 or 100MBit !).
I'd recommend doing some tests via lan cable and maybe the 300Mbit USB dongle to see what results you get, before you try anything else.
PS: Don't confuse the MB/s with Mbit or Mbit/s. If you have a 50Mbit internet connection the download rate would be somewhere about 5MB/s (my 16Mbit connection delivers about 1,3MB/s download rates) ! And 1Gbit or 1000Mbit network will not give you 10x faster transfer speeds than a 100Mbit network (but maybe 2-3 times faster, I believe).
It will probably be the router then. It's more than 10 years old and I've been wondering if it would be up to the task. But the current speeds will do for the time being. On to the backup software :)
Today only:
DrivePop Unlimited Online Backup Lifetime 67% off ($49.99):
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/drivepop-online-backup
The offer of $49.99 is for 1 Computer plan for lifetime but you can upgrade to additional computers for $30.00 each.
I signed up for this myself last time it was offered, mostly for testing it for use as a secondary online backup (already have online backup at CrashPlan) and it has been working allright. DrivePop is actually a reseller of http://www.livedrive.com/ but they don't offer lifetime subscriptions as far as I can see.
That's the general definition of Lifetime in the computer world, I assume most people know that. In any case you're not losing a fortune if they go down. There's some info about the company here btw.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livedrive
(I'm not associated with them or with DrivePop in any way btw).
Alright got my acronis and i'm backing up :)
So i would like two kopies of my backups. Aronis as an option to backup the backups. But would it be better to have it create two backups from the start, instead of having it creating a backup of the backup (copies of copies and all that)
BTW, anyone know how i can make a disk accessible through the internet? Or what that is called? (Preferably with free NAS since i'm using that)
Not sure what you mean by backup of the backups..? To an additional or an external drive ?
I'd recommend finding some personal backup plan, e.g. after the initial backup you could do a daily incremental backup to the NAS, that keeps the initial one and only adds files that have changed since last backup, so you have very quick daily backups despite using the older router/switch. Then you could add a full backup to external USB drive, maybe once a month and disconnect that one from everything to store it in a safe place. So even if your NAS or the backup on it should ever be destroyed you might have the USB for worst case scenarios. But anyone will tell you different when it comes to backup plans, you will need to find what works best for yourself here. TrueImage can do live backups on-the-fly as well, if I remember correct, working in the background saving anything to NAS while you work, but never tested that before as my NAS does not run 24/7.
Access from the internet is part of FreeNAS (as is with most NAS). I never used that so I recommend checking the manual (I think I linked that before). I'd guess you need some account from an dynamic DNS service (usually free), so that you have a static address to access your NAS. FreeNAS should be telling you which dynDNS service it supports, then it lets you add some account data and logs into the service when the NAS goes online. Now the DNS service links the static adress (the one you will use to connect from the net) with the dynamic address from your provider (that might change every time you connect). If you have a static internet connection, you might not need the DNS service to find the NAS from the net.
I created a backup of my pc to hard disk 1 of the freenas.
Acronis has an option that can be checked when you create the backup to create a copy of the backup. I set it to create a copy of the backup to hard disk 2 of the freenas. I was just wondering if it wouldn't be better just to create two backups straight away, instead of it making a copy of the first backup.
I've also been wondering if i should take one of the hard disks out of the freenas and put it into my pc. So i would create one backup on a disk inside my PC and then create a copy of that backup to the freenas.
is there a way to pause a backup?
I read that it was possible before i bought the product. Something about it having a 1 GB buffer that would allow the program to terminate properly when the connection failed. I haven't gotten it to work though. It just starts from the beginning after connection problems.
For Acronis True Image drive or file backup jobs, it will pause backup automatically if you shut down your computer or PC goes to energy saving mode. Acronis will try to reconnect when PC is online again and finish backup then. This should work with TI 2011 and newer versions at least. I'm not aware of a way to manually pause a drive/volume/file backup.
I did not try non-stop backup (that one constantly runs in background all the time), so I can't say for that one, but I remember reading something about automatic pausing backup there too.
Note: Make sure your server/NAS is running before you restart the PC if you have an unfinished backup job, as if Acronis cannot connect to the backup files, the backup job will fail and you have to start a new one. As far as I know there is a warning before backup is cancelled and it gives you another 10 minutes to connect to your network share again, but I'm not 100% sure on that now. If something goes wrong, try to connect to your network share from Windows explorer and see if you can access correctly.
As for your previous post and the best way to do duplicate backups, I'm not really sure, but maybe FreeNAS' ZFS snaphot function and replication tasks could be used for that. I'll check that when I find some free time. Note that it's better to keep an additional regular monthly and/or weekly backup, than a daily duplicate only - if your PC got infected with virus/trojan you might find an additional older but clean copy more helpful than 2 infected recent ones. ;)