Hey there,
so it has been a while since I built my backup NAS. A few things have changed since then.
With this blogpost I wanted to address the changes and improvements I made to the system, but also the Problems I ran into.
Problems
One of the first problems I ran into was the granularity of the backups. I initially planned to have hourly backups, but the system was too slow for hat. The ZFS ARC cache filled up quickly, resulting in slow performance. I managed to speed it up by a lot, by adding an SSD as the target for the eduplication table. But still, hourly backups were a bit too much, I went down to a Backup every 4 hours. I also swichted from creating tarballs to irectly just rsyncing into the horuly folder
In the end I am running following commands every 4 hours, every day and every week:
Hourly backup:
#!/bin/bash
rsync -avP --ignore-missing-args --delete-after /mnt/backup/gameserver/base/ /mnt/backup/gameserver/hourly/"$(date '%H')"/
Daily backup:
#!/bin/bash
rsync -avP --ignore-missing-args --delete-after /mnt/backup/gameserver/base/ /mnt/backup/gameserver/daily/"$(date '%d')"/
Weekly backup:
#!/bin/bash
rsync -avP --ignore-missing-args --delete-after /mnt/backup/gameserver/base/ /mnt/backup/gameserver/weekly/"$(date '%U')"/
![](https://sx.5trubel.de/exiv9y.png)
Cronjobs in TrueNAS
Opting for deduplication and compression, I managed to save a lot of space. Every backup is around 150GB, but with deduplication, I only need around - 5 GB on average per backup.
Another problem I encountered was with the power supply. It was an older one and unfortunately, it stopped working after I shut down the NAS. It was uite nerve-wracking to see the NAS refusing to start up again after fixing some other issues.
Improvements
I originally added 4x 1TB WD Reds as well, thinking that I would need the extra storage capacity. However, as I evaluated my backup needs and nalyzed the space usage, I realized that having those additional drives was somewhat pointless. They were not contributing significantly to the overall torage capacity, and their presence was only adding complexity to the system.
![](https://sx.5trubel.de/be1ab1.png)
The final storage configuration
After careful consideration, I made the decision to remove the 4x 1TB WD Reds from the backup NAS. This allowed me to streamline the setup and focus n optimizing the performance and efficiency of the remaining drives. By eliminating the unnecessary drives, I was able to simplify the configuration nd reduce the potential points of failure.
Changes
I am no longer only using the NAS as a backup target. With the ample storage capacity, I have expanded its usage to include other purposes. urrently, I utilize the NAS as a storage solution for various needs, such as hosting my GitLab instance and serving as an archive for "Linux ISOs".
Conclusion
I am actually pretty happy how it turned out and how easy TrueNAS is to use. I can easily manage the backups and the system itself. I am also happy ith the energy consumption, which is around 50W on average. I am also happy with the performance, I can easily restore files and the system is running moothly.
That's it for now, I hope you enjoyed reading this blogpost. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to me on X or Discord.