After learning that the Synology device I put together for this customer on a budget will not sync the way I want it to, to Backblaze, I am heavily considering using rsync.net. rsync.net has been around a super long time and has phone support (back blaze doesn’t have phone support at all). It’s only $0.02 more per GB etc.
Has anyone had experience with rsync.net for hosting off-site backups?
My goal is to eventually stand up a few racks in a DC for an off-site SAN I can offer to my customers.
I love B2, don’t get me wrong but it won’t work the way we need with Synology. I mean it syncs out, but good luck on pulling data back in with the inbuilt “CloudSync” app. Synology says we should be using the “Hyper Backup” program they offer, but it doesn’t work with B2 but does work with Generic rsync. Just looking for a 1-stop solution as we grow our Backup Services to scale out for everything. rsync, as a service (not rsync.net) is how we used to handle our customers off-site back in the day to our rack at the office via our Linux based NAS we created for their sites and custom scripting (bash) + cron.
Did a lil testing today with Uploading nd restoring roughly 20GB of files to both Rsync.net and Wasabi using Synology. rsync uplod was slow as molasses, wasabi was fast. Restore was so slow from rsync.net I canceled it after an hour. Wasabi restore as 20 ish minutes. See the logs
CO. I’m sure it would be faster if it was in the North East region, but alas, they do not have a DC in the NE. I am finding that Synology is lacking and Wasabi is over complicated in terms of managing accounts/buckets etc
I really just want to use BackBlaze B2, but the Synology Hyper backup doesn’t support them. Their “Cloud Sync” product does, but is just a sync app, not a true off-site backup and recovery solution.
This is quickly becoming over complicated and super annoying and it’s really driving me back to working on creating my own NAS from scratch. FreeNAS for me was buggy when I test drove it. This synology thing works, but not with the services I care to use. Technically it would work great if I had the resources to stand up a SAN in a DC and use rsync to my own cluster, but alas, I do not currently. It’d work great with rsync.com is they had a DC closer to me.
Curious to know what problems you had with FreeNAS. I’m wondering it rumor is true that after FreeNAS 12.0 release they will be offering a Linux Kernel option. That would be great.
I sure hope they do release a Linux Kernel Option.
Some of the issues I had was random hangs on the web UI, Random SMB shares not being accessible or dropping out and lots of their core BSD packages were super out of date when you checked them.
I’m sure I could have went the TruNAS route at least to get support etc. IDK. I love ZFS and Linux has support for it now which isn’t too bad, but still lacking boot/root zfs raid support without doing bunch of hacky stuff.
I kind of get where you are coming from with the FreeNAS arena - I have a 60TB unit and I love it – but it definitely has its quirks, and its far from a set it up, and walk away type of scenario.
In terms of SMB, my only comparison was setting up a share to use with my Macs Time Machine. Test systems were FreeBSD jail on FreeNAS running AFP server, FreeBSD jail on FreeNAS with SMB share, Xcp-NG Arch Linux VM running AFP, XCP-NG Arch Linux VM running SMB. I’ve unfortunately had some problems with the Time Machine backups needing to be recreated. The worst performer was FreeNAS share with SMB, followed by FreeNAS share with AFP. The Linux systems – no Time Machine rebuild in either system for the last 4 months.
In terms of boot/root ZFS, I’ve configured two ZFS on root systems with Arch Linux running in a VM on FreeNAS. I’m not sure if its hacky stuff or not, however there was definitely a little bit of an art to setting up the ZFS stuff – way more involved as compared to a standard Ubuntu quick install from disk. ZFS is great when working with VMs – you can make a template VM (for example perform an Arch install (ZFS on root, dataset setup) and install all the base packages – networking, mirrors, zshell, WM or desktop, etc) and then its possible just clone zfs send/receive the datasets to new datasets to create a new VM. It really makes creating new VM’s from scratch extremely simple. I’d love if FreeNAS went with linux since it would be possible to use KVM as the hypervisor rather than bhyve – which has its limitations.
@kevdog I think I remember reading something about that root/boot ZoL setup and how to do it. To be honest, I setup a simple mdadm raid1 on the boot vols, and used ZoL on the dataset drives on a Ubuntu build and it worked flawlessly. I scripted the heck out of that machine for setting up and managing the ZFS, among checks and alerts for my root mdadm raid1, and setting up samba and a script to create users/share to the dataset. The system would be amazing if it had a nice webUI, but alas, I suck at writing PHP securely. Wish I could find a dev that would work with me for a stake in that sub-company I want to create just for BDR stuff.
I also really hate that FreeNAS has no centralized management. Synology is pretty stable, and I think in this use case for this customer who I put this thing together for is just going to get a sync to my B2 account and if on the rare occasion that I will have to pull down his off-site, I will do it on a *nix box using rclone or something. and rsync that to another NAS if his fails or the building goes up in smoke. I Have a deadline of Friday to roll this thing out. Been messing with it all week trying to get it to do what I want. At this point, the best scenario is the one I just mentioned. I really ant to collect my money for the device and get his monthly revenue off the off-site storage
And just to expand on Wasabi a bit, (something that has been making me pull my hair out for two full days) is that wasabi in a use case for an MSP selling off-site storage requires you write scripts from templates to provision buckets to clients (client 1 can not see the bucket for client 2) etc. I followed every last word of their RTFM and it still wouldn’t work. Backblaze has no such issues. B2 is just point, click, set forget. Hey Wasabi, this is 2020, right?
