NAS Build (Part III)

(This is a continuation of my previous post...)


In the last post I talked about the RAID failure and needing to find a new solution. In this post I will talk about the solution I went with.

If we are to look back at the failed attempt, the reason I decided to go with a RAID5 setup with my 3 disks is 

  • Having a 2TB disk
    • Between vindy and myself having 2TBs seem enough space
  • Redundancy 
    • The Raid5 disk can survive a 1 disk failure due to the way parity works.


How do I achieve similar outcomes without the power of RAID. The answer is "Nightly Backups"

First of all I nuked the RAID5 and partitioned the disks again. This time I created 3 NTFS partitions. Did I hear you ask why NTFS. If for some reason I get the disks out of the NAS I have the flexibility to plug them into any of the devices we use. As mentioned in my first NAS post I use an XPS 15 with Ubuntu and Vindi uses an XPS 12 with Windows. I mounted these so that OMV knows about them. This was done in `Storage` --> `File Systems` option.



Then I created 3 shared folders in the 3 HDDs. You can easily do this in `AccessRightsManagement` --> `Shared Folders` section. I'm gonn use one of those shares as my data drive, another as Vindi's data drive and the third as Vindi's backup drive. What about my backup drive you would ask. Well I was able to get redundancy for 2TBs using RAID5 and 3 * 1 TB HDDs but with the new approach this is a compromise I had to make. Theoretically it doesn't make sense to create a shared folder for a backup drive but you will see why soon.



Next step is to create the shares. I'm using SMB shares for this. The reason is I have Windows and Linux machines in my network. I created them using the `Services` -> `SMB` -> `Shares` option. The UI is intuitive and straight forward. As you can see in the above screenshot I have not exposed the backup folder via SMB.


Next is the daily backup job. OMV comes with the ability to create rsync cron jobs out of the box. This can be achieved via `Services` -> `Rsync` -> `Jobs`.


You can create a pretty decent rsync chron job using the UI. What more can you ask for. Well there you go. That was it.

I have had this running for a good 3 weeks without any issues. I'm happy with the setup. Below is the load average of the system. The spikes you see every day are due to the cron job.


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