3-year-old MSP. Using ninja backup.
We have a customer who flat out refuses to accept the false dichotomy of choosing G-Suite or OneDrive (Good for him!)
But now I have to engineer a file server for 7 window standard PCs. About 5 users.
They have it in mind to spend $5000 to $7,000 on a server.
I’m building them a true nas (with that allowance I’m not actually making a whole lot in today’s market for RAM and hard drives)
The next question is how do I back up their truneas? I’m thinking physical to cloud back up. Or alternatively having a replication to my office and storing backups on a large tune as at my office.
If I host his backups I want to be aware of what the cloud competition is charging.
Does Ninja One have backup for Linux? Could I install ninja backup on a truenas?
Then I wouldn’t have to train people or learn anything new about backups and just lean into Ninja One.
Thoughts? Snide remarks?
For a file server, you do not need a whole lot of RAM or CPU. Even something that uses DDR4 memory would be fine really. I wouldn’t over engineer it.
As far as backups you have a number of options. I currently backup my TrueNAS box two ways. First I have an RSYNC job that pushes my files to my Synology. I also have a replication job that sends snapshot copies to a small NUC device I have. In my case I let my Synology push data to the cloud for a offsite copy. But RSYNC will work for that too. My NUC device is just running Debian 13 with the zfsutils-linux and zfs-auto-snapshot packages installed. I then created a ZFS pool on a second drive in that box, created datasets to match the datasets on my TrueNAS box, set up SSH for ZFS send and finally created a PUSH replication task in TrueNAS with my nuc box as the target. That nuc box is low power and doesn’t really do much else so I didn’t need a full blown instance of TrueNAS to accept the zfs send data.
The latest version of TrueNAS also has a data protection task for syncing data to the cloud (e.g., S3 or similar) but I haven’t personally used it yet.
RSYNC is pretty versatile, you could even use it to copy data to a local USB hard drive. Honestly with all of the features built into TrueNAS I am not sure I would mess with third party backup software.
I prefer backing up to another TrueNAS because ZFS replication is so efficient but “TrueCloud” which is using StorJ or using Backblaze are good as well.
