After my experiments with OpenMediaVault (and success) I decided to try out TrueNAS Scale. The first thing I noticed about TrueNAS is that it’s legit, and by that I mean it’s described as “Open Enterprise Storage” and on the web site it says “Award-Winning Storage Trusted by Over 60% of the Fortune 500” and lists a bunch of huge corporations. Sounds legit. We’re using the Community Edition which is to say it’s the open source version with no paid support contract or whatever…
Now, besides all of that I just wanted to try it out because I had heard good things, especially about the ZFS file system, which is more advanced than RAID. I had another old Dell Optiplex laying around from a failed client project years ago but it would not boot so I was in no rush with this TrueNAS testing. Then out of nowhere my sister messaged me with a photo of an HP Z420 Workstation and said “How do I get rid of this?” and I said “I’ll take it!” So I did.
The HP Z420 Workstation is a beast of a box with space for six drives so it seemed like a good candidate for TrueNAS… so that’s what I did. (I’ll write up a separate post about the Z420 and just focus on TrueNAS for this post.)
Because I’ve already got a fully functional NAS running this one was for testing, trying, and learning.
It took some clicking around and minimal doc reading to get a pool setup, and eventually an SMB share I could store files on. I also installed some containerized applications. And then I pulled out the three drives and swapped in two other drives and set those up. Then I added back in the original drives but just two instead of three. At this point I wanted to just test things out and see what would happen. I saw warnings about degraded pools and such. Nice to see. I haven’t quite figured out exporting a pool and re-importing again, which is what I think I might need to do someday.
In my mind the nice thing about OpenMediaVault just using an ext4 drive is that if the system dies I can just plug that drive into another computer and access all the data. (It’ll need to be a computer running Linux, but that’s okay.)
For these TrueNAS drives with ZFS it doesn’t seem to be that simple. I know you can run ZFS on Linux and I’ve even found a version for macOS but I think I basically need to learn all about ZFS before I feel confident I can rescue my data if things go wrong.
The obvious solution seems to be running two (or more) TrueNAS servers so one backs up to another, and you’ve got a second one to move drives to in case the first one fails.
I’m sure there are answers to all of this… if you have them, or other suggestions, feel free to share! Otherwise just consider this my notebook where I write things down for future me.
5 replies on “TrueNAS Testing”
RE: Data Rescue
FYI The data replication target doesn’t HAVE to be running TrueNAS. I have an old laptop running Ubuntu Server x86-64 and an USB external hard drive. Every day at 11:55PM the laptop wakes up from sleep, accepts the day’s updates in a midnight replication run, and goes back to sleep half an hour later.
That may or may not work for your scenario. My target scenario: In case of emergency when I have only a few minutes to grab whatever I can on my way out the door, that USB external drive has a copy of my data as of midnight and likely (23.5/24 probability) already shut down and safely removable.
Just built my second one this week. TrueNAS is great! You made a good choice.
Roger is correct. Ours backs up to Backblaze for real cheap, Google Drive (encrypted prior), an external drive, and (now) to the second NAS. We also have family in other parts of the country backing up to our NAS as well.
Roger, oh right, I didn’t mean to suggest it had to be a second TrueNAS instance for the data, I was concerned about the machine running TrueNAS failing and then being able to get to the data on the ZFS drives without another TrueNAS computer readily available. (I’ll have another post about that soon!)
Chris, the “backup for family not in my own house” is something I definitely want to do. I welcome any tip on that!
Rsync and Syncthing are our friends. Both work very well if you set the workflow up correctly.