Back It Up

I work with a lot of data.

I have a couple terabytes of data from my photography and video work, and I need it backed up.

I recently built a server for the purpose of consolidating all of my external hard drives. I needed something which… 

• Had Some Sort of Redundancy (i.e. RAID)
• Was non-proprietary
• Ideally was Open Source
• Could Hold a Ton of Data
• Was (at least somewhat) Expandable

I also had the somewhat minor requirement that it could run Plex Media Server. I like movies and TV shows, and I have a lot of them. I like Plex because it consolidates all of my media in one place to stream to however many devices I want.

So today, I wanted to briefly go over what I settled on. I’m not going to get into the specifics of how to set everything up, but I’ll throw up some links at the bottom of the post which were helpful to me.

Enter Ubuntu

The first thing I chose was to use Ubuntu as my operating system. I liked that it was free, open source, and there were a ton of tutorials out there to help me along.

Before I installed Ubuntu, I had used a command line interface (CLI) once. Now I feel fairly comfortable navigating around with it. If you choose to go the Ubuntu route, you can still install a graphic user interface (GUI), but I think it’s worth it to learn the CLI.

ZFS Over Raid

At work, we use a system running FreeNAS to archive all of our video footage. The cool thing about FreeNAS is that it runs a version of ZFS.

ZFS is a kind of software RAID solution. I like it more than traditional RAID formats because it has built in error checking and a few other features I found useful. Unfortunately, it doesn’t ship with Ubuntu because of licensing reasons.

However, it’s pretty easy to find instructions on how to install ZFS for Linux. (I used this one specifically)

I decided to go with a Raid-z2 setup. This means I can lose any two disks out of the six in my server, and I’ll still have my data.

The downside to ZFS is that you need to start with however many hard drives you’re going to end with. I can’t easily add a 7th hard drive to my server. This is something I decided I could live with, because my plan is to simply upgrade hard drive sizes. Whenever I replace all of my hard drives with larger ones, the overall storage space of my server will automatically increase.

There are a lot of little quirks with ZFS, and I highly suggest heading over to the FreeNAS forums to learn about them. It’s probably not for everyone, but it’s perfect for me.

RAID Is Not A Backup

Just because I can lose 2/6 of my disks, doesn’t mean my data is backed up. The files can become corrupt and all I have is a bunch of useless hard drives.

Right now, I keep a copy of everything on my main desktop computer. Also, not a perfect solution (but better than nothing). In the future, I plan on putting together a second server which will be a duplicate of the one I have.

This second server will go somewhere off-site, so that if my apartment burns down… all of my data will still be safe. It turns out that computers are expensive, so that will have to wait sometime until the future.

All Up And Running

It’s taken me a while to pick out all of the parts to my backup plan. Hopefully this post helps you with yours. There really isn’t one correct way to back up your data. What matters is that you do it some way.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I might not have an answer, but at the very least I’ll point you towards someone who does.

Later,
Freddie

*Post Thumbnail by torkildr on Flickr *

 

Useful Links

Plex Media Server

Setting Up ZFS on Ubuntu

FreeNAS Forums

Creating and Manipulating Zpools