Home NAS / Backup Server

[Spades45]

I have an old computer laying around that I'd like to turn into a central backup server. All I want is a PC hooked up to my router so that I can have a central place for my foobar2k library, Picasa photos, Clonezilla backups, Windows restore states etc. Obviously I'd like to access the files wirelessly. I also want RAID-5 for redundancy. I'm going to buy two SATA hard drives (to start), other than that I'm all set for hardware.

Any suggestions for an OS? All my computers run Win7 so something that plays well with Windows and won't require a whole lot of re-learning would be nice. I was originally planning on doing this with Windows Home Server back in 09 but I know it received less than stellar reviews, especially the newer version. Anything I should look at in the same vein?

 

[Zaap]

Just plain old Windows 7 (x64) has handled all my home server needs for years now.

I used to use various flavors of Linux (which worked well, but Linux requires more hand-holding than I'm willing to bother with) tried WHS- and just kept coming back to the regular desktop version of Windows doing the job the best, with the least futzing around. It's compatible with everything, plays well with everything, remote access into it works perfectly, you already know how to use it, and despite hype to the contrary, I find it rock-stable. I've only rebooted my W7 NAS a few times.

If it were an enterprise setup, it probably wouldn't be well-suited, but for a home setup with a normal household amount of users, Windows works just fine.

I'm using 7, I'm guessing 8 will probably work just as well.

 

[tomt4535]

You need 3 hard drives for RAID 5, so just as long as the 2 new ones you buy are the same as the drive that is already in the system you should be fine. Also, don't expect to get stellar performance out of wireless. If you are going to be doing any streaming or heavy file transfers, wired is going to be better.

 

[smitbret]

If you're just using an old PC you have lying around:

www.lime-technology.com

Then you can upgrade as need dictates over time. Not a "true" RAID 5, but same principle and is free up to 3 drives.

 

[mikeford]

Using an old PC is a waste of money, $100 will buy a decent modern low power platform and cost of electricity and cooling pays you back fast since its a 24/7 device. Chances of an old PC slowly flaking out over time is VERY high.

I ran a pair of 2TB drives in a raid mirror fat dumb and happy for a year then something glitched and I lost both drives with ZERO warning. I think it was either a virus or some driver issue between the raid controller and windows 764, but it was a bear and half to recover even using specialized crash recovery software ($100 from Seagate) and None of the recovery was from the raid pair, I just had an older drive still in the system that had flaked out and I had not sent it in on RMA yet with backup from month or so prior.

Never again, now I run a SSD 120gb for boot and Win7 64 and very little else, with 5x 2TB drives three of which are backup only and periodically rotated in use. WD red are the only full time drives not using raid or anything else special for drivers.

 

[smitbret]

Using an old PC is a waste of money, $100 will buy a decent modern low power platform and cost of electricity and cooling pays you back fast since its a 24/7 device. Chances of an old PC slowly flaking out over time is VERY high.

I ran a pair of 2TB drives in a raid mirror fat dumb and happy for a year then something glitched and I lost both drives with ZERO warning. I think it was either a virus or some driver issue between the raid controller and windows 764, but it was a bear and half to recover even using specialized crash recovery software ($100 from Seagate) and None of the recovery was from the raid pair, I just had an older drive still in the system that had flaked out and I had not sent it in on RMA yet with backup from month or so prior.

Never again, now I run a SSD 120gb for boot and Win7 64 and very little else, with 5x 2TB drives three of which are backup only and periodically rotated in use. WD red are the only full time drives not using raid or anything else special for drivers.

I guess from a power consumption standpoint this makes sense. I assume you mean replacing an old system with an Atom system or something similar because you could hardly build a general purpose system with any kind of power for less than $100.

In my experience, though, Solid State components rarely die. HDDs and PSUs do, but if you keep things clean, cool and away from things like static electricity, they'll run for a decade or more.

 

[ControlD]

If you're just using an old PC you have lying around:

www.lime-technology.com

Then you can upgrade as need dictates over time. Not a "true" RAID 5, but same principle and is free up to 3 drives.

+1.

Unraid is a fantastic solution.

 

[Spades45]

looks like i'm going with unraid.

Using an old PC is a waste of money, $100 will buy a decent modern low power platform and cost of electricity and cooling pays you back fast since its a 24/7 device. Chances of an old PC slowly flaking out over time is VERY high.

I ran a pair of 2TB drives in a raid mirror fat dumb and happy for a year then something glitched and I lost both drives with ZERO warning. I think it was either a virus or some driver issue between the raid controller and windows 764, but it was a bear and half to recover even using specialized crash recovery software ($100 from Seagate) and None of the recovery was from the raid pair, I just had an older drive still in the system that had flaked out and I had not sent it in on RMA yet with backup from month or so prior.

Never again, now I run a SSD 120gb for boot and Win7 64 and very little else, with 5x 2TB drives three of which are backup only and periodically rotated in use. WD red are the only full time drives not using raid or anything else special for drivers.

i plan on using an efficient PSU (maybe picoPSU) and underclocking the CPU. unraid boots from USb flash, otherwise I would use a CF-to-SATA adapter and boot from an old CF card.

thanks dudes, any other recommendations before I embark on my adventure? ha

 

[Anteaus]

Just make sure you maintain a seperate backup copy of whatever you put on that array. Take what Mikeford said and learn from it. People tend to get all gooey eyed over Raid 5 thinking they can get away with not maintaining seperate backups only to get burned pretty bad. It's designed to help maintain server continuity and create large contiguous volumes.

 

[smitbret]

Yep, as good as unRAID is, it's not a substitute for a real backup solution. I don't backup all of my NAS because I have the original DVDs and BRs. However, any purchased digital downloads like music, ebooks, etc. get backed up daily along with all of my photos, home videos, e-mails and documents.

 

[ControlD]

Yep, as good as unRAID is, it's not a substitute for a real backup solution. I don't backup all of my NAS because I have the original DVDs and BRs. However, any purchased digital downloads like music, ebooks, etc. get backed up daily along with all of my photos, home videos, e-mails and documents.

Just out of curiosity, how are you backing up your unraid? I have used a few different methods and just use rsync these days, but I'm always looking for other ideas.

 

[zanejohnson]

i run a flavor of opensuse

 

[Trey22]

I run FreeNAS (similar to unRAID) for my home server and love it. No need for a RAID card if you have just a few drives, the ZFS file system takes care of all your RAID-type levels.

It holds all of my data (docs, music, vids, backups, images, torrents), and is accessible by all of my devices (iPhones/iPads, Macbook, Win7, Blu-Ray players, PS3, etc.). It is all backed up to an external hard drive.

 

[beginner99]

I would never bother with RAID for a home setup. RAID is for availability and never ever for back-up. Availability does not really matter for a home media server but adds management cost (your time).

 

[Zaap]

I would never bother with RAID for a home setup. RAID is for availability and never ever for back-up. Availability does not really matter for a home media server but adds management cost (your time).

Yeah, I used to get into the fancier setups for a home server because it was fun to learn and setup.

But what changed my mind was just simple benchmarks- does it really matter over a home LAN/or wirelessly/or remotely with only a few users? How much time to transfer data to and from the NAS? Am I giving up other function I could be using the machine for in addition to file serving, and if so, for what?

What I found -for my setup anyway- was that it didn't make a whole lot of difference- the LAN was the limiting factor, not the NAS setup, and even in some cases (FreeNAS at the time I tried it, hopefully not since then) transfers were actually slower.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I would never bother with RAID for a home setup. RAID is for availability and never ever for back-up. Availability does not really matter for a home media server but adds management cost (your time).

And don't you want availability at home? I don't know about you, but I rather spend my time doing other things than rebuilding an entire file system from backups when a drive fails. With raid I can just pop a new drive in and let it rebuild and go on with my day. The backups are there in case something else catastrophic happens but the odds of that are much more slim than a drive failure. Raid is not a backup, but it sure saves lot of time and grief when a drive fails. The performance increase is the icing on the cake, even though it's not really needed that much it's there. It's nice to be able to saturate a gigabit link with spindle drives. :biggrin:

As for the OP, I'm a big fan of CentOS, and using mdraid, then use samba and/or NFS for sharing. mdraid is actually quite easy to use too. The --help info is useful and straight to the point.

 

[Anteaus]

And don't you want availability at home? I don't know about you, but I rather spend my time doing other things than rebuilding an entire file system from backups when a drive fails. With raid I can just pop a new drive in and let it rebuild and go on with my day. The backups are there in case something else catastrophic happens but the odds of that are much more slim than a drive failure. Raid is not a backup, but it sure saves lot of time and grief when a drive fails. The performance increase is the icing on the cake, even though it's not really needed that much it's there. It's nice to be able to saturate a gigabit link with spindle drives. :biggrin:

As for the OP, I'm a big fan of CentOS, and using mdraid, then use samba and/or NFS for sharing. mdraid is actually quite easy to use too. The --help info is useful and straight to the point.

How are you rebuilding anything? If you get a bad drive you just replace the drive and copy the files directly from backup. A bad drive in no way affects the rest of the system and everything else just keeps moving. There is no time loss from having to rebuild an array or worse potentially having a cascading failure which can happen if a drive drops out in Raid 5. Once a drive fails the percentage of a total array failure starts climbing dramatically due to the increase load on the rest of the array.

Raid 5 as a home solution for "most" people is excessive. That said, there are specific cases where it is useful. I'm glad it works for you but for people who are dabbling it's too risky and expensive. I always find it humorous when people use consumer hard drives for Raid 5...at that point you're just asking to get screwed.

 

[Red Squirrel]

How are you rebuilding anything? If you get a bad drive you just replace the drive and copy the files directly from backup. A bad drive in no way affects the rest of the system and everything else just keeps moving. There is no time loss from having to rebuild an array or worse potentially having a cascading failure which can happen if a drive drops out in Raid 5. Once a drive fails the percentage of a total array failure starts climbing dramatically due to the increase load on the rest of the array.

Raid 5 as a home solution for "most" people is excessive. That said, there are specific cases where it is useful. I'm glad it works for you but for people who are dabbling it's too risky and expensive. I always find it humorous when people use consumer hard drives for Raid 5...at that point you're just asking to get screwed.

The backup will never be 100% up to date, the permissions might need to all be fixed for stuff to work, and unless it's a verbatim file per file backup you will need to reorganize everything. you'll be down until you get all the files in place and everything reconfigured (mostly permissions) so that it works. Things like mysql databases and other stuff will be down till the data files are fully copied over.

I use 8 1TB consumer drives in raid 5 + hot spare and cold spare. Never really had issues other than one issue specific to my hardware that I gave up figuring out a long time ago. (built a new file server so stuff will be moved to it soon). That said, raid 10 is a better solution than 5 but 5 is good in most cases too and it's the best balance of reliability and disk space.

That said, raid is not a backup, but it will hopefully prevent you from needing to use the backups when a drive fails. Not if, but when. Mechanical drives are more and more unreliable these days and are much bigger so you have more data at stake.

 

[beginner99]

And don't you want availability at home? I don't know about you, but I rather spend my time doing other things than rebuilding an entire file system from backups when a drive fails. With raid I can just pop a new drive in and let it rebuild and go on with my day. The backups are there in case something else catastrophic happens but the odds of that are much more slim than a drive failure. Raid is not a backup, but it sure saves lot of time and grief when a drive fails. The performance increase is the icing on the cake, even though it's not really needed that much it's there. It's nice to be able to saturate a gigabit link with spindle drives. :biggrin:

I think I can survive without my media files for couple of hours and since they are on an external HDD which UI could just plug into my pc, they would actually be available.

Rebuild filesystem? I would just copy them back to the new drive, drag & drop or Ctrl+c. Trivial.

Speed is irrelevant as even 100mbs ethernet is more than fast enough even for full bluray and in sequential transfer even my crappy green drives saturate gigabit enet.

The backup will never be 100% up to date, the permissions might need to all be fixed for stuff to work, and unless it's a verbatim file per file backup you will need to reorganize everything. you'll be down until you get all the files in place and everything reconfigured (mostly permissions) so that it works. Things like mysql databases and other stuff will be down till the data files are fully copied over.

I use 8 1TB consumer drives in raid 5 + hot spare and cold spare. Never really had issues other than one issue specific to my hardware that I gave up figuring out a long time ago. (built a new file server so stuff will be moved to it soon). That said, raid 10 is a better solution than 5 but 5 is good in most cases too and it's the best balance of reliability and disk space.

That said, raid is not a backup, but it will hopefully prevent you from needing to use the backups when a drive fails. Not if, but when. Mechanical drives are more and more unreliable these days and are much bigger so you have more data at stake.

It's a home network and I live alone. So permissions are irrelevant except that I would have to share the copied folder again. Not really much of a deal. I mean I don't have daily drive failures...and databases sure isn't standard consumer stuff and I'm pretty sure if you copy the data back to the exact same previous path it will just work again.

Yeah, some stuff could be lost due to backup being out of date but it's goddamn media files which could be ripped or dl'ed again and real important stuff I backup immediately and since they are documents they can be put somewhere online.

 

[Mixolydian]

FreeNAS

 

[smitbret]

FreeNAS

FreeNAS is awesome, but hardly ideal for an old PC. An old CPU may not be adequate, the HDDs may be mismatched and most likely there won't be nearly enough memory to run FreeNAS cleanly.

 

[sourceninja]

For important data, I use the cloud (encrypted of course)

So that's where my banking backups, tax info, etc all go. None of it is kept locally.

For media, I turned a mac mini into a media server (attached to some fairly large external HDs). I just share out the media with plex. I don't need computer backups anymore because if I really need something its in the cloud and I don't care too much about losing a few episodes of A game of thrones.

 

[sxr7171]

I would never bother with RAID for a home setup. RAID is for availability and never ever for back-up. Availability does not really matter for a home media server but adds management cost (your time).

So true. What a headache.

There are so many good options out there. I use Nexenta. Unraid and FreeNAS are good.

Heck I'd even buy a Drobo over running a RAID box. All of these solutions are optimized enough these days to saturate a GigE port. This is for media.

For critical stuff I just email it to myself. Easily searchable. If Google lost your data, your data would be the last thing you'd be worried about. Probably your physical safety or survival would be your priority at that point.

 

[Red Squirrel]

How is raid a headache? This is a tech site. If anything it saves headaches. It's much easier to just pop a new drive, issue a couple commands and go on your way than to deal with data loss and having to go to backups and waiting till a replacement drive comes in before you can restore them. It's happened where I'm in the middle of something and get a drive failure, but I can simply keep working while it rebuilds with the hot spare, and I can then deal with the RMA process at my own leisure. Not all of my arrays have a hot spare though, but I try to do it, or at very least have a cold spare.

Hardware raid, yeah that can be a hassle. Controller failures, the fact that you have to reboot to grow the array, etc. mdadm, ZFS etc is where it's at. I don't know why people are so scared of it. I can't imagine running without raid now days for data storage. For OS I'm willing to take a chance, though it would be nice if iSCSI HBAs were not so pricy as I'd just put the OS on my SAN and have redundancy there.

 

[Red Squirrel]

double post