Do I need specialized software to run a NAS?

I have inherited a CentOS system that acts as a Samba and file server for user data. This box is running RAID-1 and the files are backed up offsite and to a second on prem machine as well as to a rotation of USB disks that serve as weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly “snapshots.” Those backups are executed using rclone (for offsite) and rsync commands in a bash script that run as a cron job.

Pretty simple and straightforward stuff. Copy my data here, here and here on an automated schedule.

Convince me that I should invest in something like TrueNAS.

What am I missing out on, or doing wrong here?

Thanks.

I am not here to convince you or change your mind. Use what makes you happy and if managing that from the command line as opposed to using specialized NAS software with a web interface works for you, then awesome. :slight_smile: My preference is to run TrueNAS.

Ha. I was kinda hoping for a bit of a sell. Thought I might be missing out. GUIs are nice sometimes. What about zfs? Is that an easier sell? Should I be using zfs? Is that a no-brainer? Or is that just a matter of preference? My predecessor insisted on ext3.

Only use ZFS if you care about data integrity. I do have plenty of content on the benefits of ZFS such as this forum post. FreeNAS ZFS Pools RAIDZ RAIDZ2 RAIDZ3 Capacity, Integrity, and Performance

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Excellent. That helps a lot. I will read through those articles. Thanks!

EDIT: data integrity is my top concern. I use RAID1. Storage is cheap. I like redundancy. I don’t have hundreds of TBs.

But, maybe there is a better way. Thanks again for the link. Love what you do. :slight_smile:

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Depending on how large your disks are (and how many) you might consider building a raidz2 or 3-way mirror, to avoid some of the risks involved with resilver (another disk dying of stress).

Thanks.

I have a couple of different use cases. The first is just a few TB of office file data, some multimedia. For this, I have two disks in RAID1 and data copied via scripts to separate machines.

The other case is archival video storage with about 12 TB in a RAID1 configuration using LVM.

These are systems I inherited and I am not all that familiar with this stuff. But now that I am managing them, I am trying to learn what I can with an eye to what comes next when these systems retire.

Appreciate the suggestions.

What does your employer expect from you ? If something goes wrong sounds like you will be to blame !

Ha. Yeah I guess that’s possible. My response to living in this reality is to try to learn, quick.

:wink: