With the wide availability of cheap backup services like backblaze, this nas building nonsense is a complete waste of time.
I have 3-4 direct attach usb and FireWire disks. One is a working disk, one backup, the rest for various things.
If one of the working disks fails, I have a local backup. If they all fail, call backblaze.
In all cases, I avoid wasting time and money setting up ersatz infrastructure that in reality is less reliable and more expensive than the simple solution.
For the tower of babel that is linux mdadm/lvm/... I agree, but ZFS really is trivial to get running, and easier to use than multiple disks - rather than worrying about what I put on each drive, and manually doing backups, I ran a couple of ZFS admin commands three years ago that told it to put all the disks in a big raidz, then stopped worrying about it. When a disk fails I replace it and run one command, no messing around restoring from backup / changing shortcuts / reinstalling.
> With the wide availability of cheap backup services like backblaze, this nas building nonsense is a complete waste of time.
My home upload speed is 3mbps.
I make weekly image backups on top of my increment file backups. The images are ~800GB and 200GB. Additionally, I have a ~1TB media collection.
Uploading the images to Backblaze weekly is clearly unfeasible. Restoring from old images in the event of a failure would be extremely time consuming.
Therefore, I have a 14 TB NAS that should last me a long, long while and also serves as a Plex media server. To lose data I really care about requires that four drives / two computers fail or my house burns down. I am willing to accept that risk.
The images are Windows Backup vhdx's, so I'm not sure that's possible. It isn't really worth my time to investigate - it happens automatically on a schedule and over a gigabit LAN it goes fast enough and neither the performance of the computer nor the NAS are noticeably impacted.
In an ideal world, Windows would just use ZFS, but hey, you can't have everything. ;)
That's great if your content can fit on one physical drive - but that's not the case for everyone.
However, even that aside, I would likely still use ZFS even with your solution since I make sure of other ZFS features aside just running a software RAID (eg ZFS snapshots, checksumming, send/receive, etc).
I have 3-4 direct attach usb and FireWire disks. One is a working disk, one backup, the rest for various things.
If one of the working disks fails, I have a local backup. If they all fail, call backblaze.
In all cases, I avoid wasting time and money setting up ersatz infrastructure that in reality is less reliable and more expensive than the simple solution.