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.
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. 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.
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).
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.