Small Business NAS for backup

[modder man]

I would like to get something like a synology or perhaps a distro of linux on something like an HP Microserver to backup a small business. I would like it to be a backup target for all the workstations as well as servers. We would need about 4TB of space. I would also like to be able to back the NAS up to a cloud service such as crashplan. Looking for suggestions. Thanks.

FreeNAS is not an option

 

[neo]

Take a look at FreeNAS.

It's free and has a crashplan plugin.

 

[modder man]

Used FreeNAS once, never again.

 

[markarr]

If you want a plug and play unit then synology, lots of people on here like them. If you would rather roll your own, then freenas is one of the most flexible storage distro out there in regards to addins.

 

[modder man]

FreeNAS is out for sure....i will not for any reason use freeNAS. Do the cloud backup options with a synology work well?

 

[markarr]

Haven't personally used them before but looks fairly limited on cloud backup providers.

 

[modder man]

Me either, I imagine S3 is decent. But I have no experience with it and it looks to be a little pricy for 4TB of data.

 

[markarr]

Looks like it does amazon glacier as well if you are using it as a backup only. which is only a penny per gb stored.

 

[modder man]

What scares me with glacier is perhaps the cost with getting the data out. I really do not understand their pricing tiers with the "puts" and "requests".

 

[CreoleLakerFan]

FreeNAS is out for sure....i will not for any reason use freeNAS. Do the cloud backup options with a synology work well?

Tech reasons or other?

I use it because I've gotten familiar with it over the past several years, and it feels intuitive to me. However I really hate the culture of the support forum - I will likely move in another direction once I have gotten far enough along the learning curve of OmniOS/Napp-It in my lab.

 

[neo]

For 4TB then just buy a retail consumer product.

 

[modder man]

The supoort forum is just it, I struggled with my initial configuration of freenas. I did finally get it to work but the response from the forums completely turned me off. I will likely never try it again.

Looking at getting two synology DS215j one back up to another remotely? Does that sound like a good idea or should I use one to back up to glacier?

 

[neo]

The supoort forum is just it

This is just the norm for a majority of open source communities.

Some forums I only browse, and not participate.

 

[modder man]

The norm is not for people to be giant pretentious jerks to those who are new and ask questions. This forums and many others are fantastic I have never had a user here talk down to me because I asked a stupid question, that was not the case on FreeNAS forums.

 

[modder man]

Are all synology models able to backup to other offsite synologies?

 

[neo]

For a definitive answer I would contact synology support.

 

[Deslok]

I've had good luck using a custom SLES build from suse studio with samba installed on a supermicro server we had in house(the build I used was here) I had to add the yast samba plugin but it was good otherwise and you can rebuild it direct for a usb drive and deploy it preconfigured. Hardware wise for that i'd look towards a PE2950 they were available in a 6x3.5 inch configuration that supported 2tb drives(ex here) and have dual gig-e onboard with 3x PCIE 8x available. internal usb is good for booting. that plus the 2tb drives in the good deals section gives you 10TB for 100-200 for server plus trays and 300 for drives(excluding spares)

We used the SAMBA shares for an inital onsite and will be using SFTP for offsite backups of our supermicro with that image but after working with it i wouldn't have issue using a similar image internally for backups

 

[Diavuno]

For a mere 4TB I'd look at a pair of WD Myclouds or preferably the nicer EX2 line (maybe EX4 if you want upgrade options)

they dont goto crashplan that I know of... but they do mirror each other in remote locations.

WARNING: they are SLOW TO WRITE I've been getting 10-30MB/s with a herd of EX4's in parity.

but the bang for they are hard to not look at.

 

[whitey]

FreeNAS is out for sure....i will not for any reason use freeNAS. Do the cloud backup options with a synology work well?

Might I kindly ask why you are so vehemently against FreeNAS, a specific black eye or extremely bad experience/data loss? I am not per-say a proponent of FreeNAS, used it a time or two during eval and didn't find it to be a bad solution. I am a ZFS-head for sure but prefer my ZFS to come from Omni ATM.

EDIT: I get it, typical 'god-complex' of the BSD crowd from time to time, don't take it too hard :-D

 

[Deslok]

Might I kindly ask why you are so vehemently against FreeNAS, a specific black eye or extremely bad experience/data loss? I am not per-say a proponent of FreeNAS, used it a time or two during eval and didn't find it to be a bad solution. I am a ZFS-head for sure but prefer my ZFS to come from Omni ATM.

EDIT: I get it, typical 'god-complex' of the BSD crowd from time to time, don't take it too hard :-D

I cant say i've had a good experience with either one myself, I watched a FreeNAS box lose it's ZFS share after a reboot and recovery wasn't possible in the end. But that's one of the faults with inheriting infrastructure you're never quire sure what someone else has done.