I’m going to have a bit of cash to spend on my home server system and want to have a dedicated NAS server with a backup. What I currently have is almost 10 terabytes of video and data across two linux samba servers and no way of backing up anything other than the 3TB on a raid 5 setup. What I was thinking of was having two NAS servers, dedicated hardware not freenas or such, where I can have 5 bays of 4TB drives in each that are not raided. I started with raid but basically a raid is for either speed or redundancy for keeping things going with no downtime whereas I need backup more than speed or downtime security. What I want to do is have the main NAS in the server rack, did I mention I’m getting a rack, that serves the system and then the other NAS will be in my bedroom so that the main NAS can back up each drive to a corresponding drive on the bedroom NAS. I figured this way I’ll always have a redundant backup of the main NAS so that if a drive fails I can replace it and reload from the backup. For this I need two NAS units that don’t have to be the same since only one needs to have any real smarts to do it’s own backup and that don’t do anything weird with the drives other than format them with a common partition and file system. I want to be able to pull the drives if the NAS fails and still be able to read them without some kind of special raid card or a duplicate NAS. I can, if need be, run a freenas or whatever if I can’t find something that will handle the backup style I want but I’d prefer a plug and play if possible for both.
Any suggestions?
This might be a moot point if total cost of one gets anywhere close to the price of a new LTO-6 or LTO-7 tape drive since I’d rather do 4 or so tapes to backup 20 TB at about 30-40 bucks a piece. That way I could get a couple of batches and have some history instead of just a current backup, but that is at the higher end of what I’d like to shell out.