Backups

[ohio_grad_06]

So I posted a while back about NAS devices etc. My work didn't end up going that route. Anyway, with our budget, my IT director gave a suggestion.

Our company has an unlimited dropbox account that allows us to use pretty much all the space we like and has versioning. I know that dropbox isn't ideal, but bear with me.

So we have our file servers. Currently what happens is we do backups to external hard drives and those are swapped in and out. So that's to say, I do a backup of files, unhook the drive, then do a backup on another drive a few days later, and try to keep them alternated out. While this is working, this system isn't ideal obviously. We even looked into Amazon glacier and after the initial meeting nothing was done to give an idea.

My boss and I talked, and what we do have is an older server that currently has Windows 2008 r2 on it with 4 2tb drives. It does however have room for 4 more. So we repaired an error the server had, raid battery was dead to be precise. That is fixed now. This server is about 10 years old but still has multicore xeon cpus and 8gb of ram. I think enough to do what we are wanting.

The thought is to install 4 more 2tb drives, and set all of the drives in a raid 6. Raid 5 may only be possible for that system from what I'm reading due to the controller, but basically the idea is to set up the raid, then to set aside about 1tb for the OS install, which would probably be server 2019 since we are a non profit and get a discount.

The rest of the raid would be dedicated to a data partition. Then the idea would be to install the dropbox client, and use robocopy to make a copy of the data on the server, and each night to have it look for files that were changed and move a copy of that over. The server in question, it's only function would be to synchronize dropbox files.

Granted if we ever needed to recover data, it may take a while, but until we could do something different, it would be a better solution. What is the feasibility of robocopy handling this with long file names etc. Anyone done anything like this?

Also was looking at veamm's free backup solution that maybe it could work here?

 

[MichaelBits]

If I read that right... you basically just need the server to be a file server?

Have you considered loading up FreeNAS on it? It can link with Dropbox as well.

 

[SAFCasper]

If I read that right... you basically just need the server to be a file server?

Have you considered loading up FreeNAS on it? It can link with Dropbox as well.

+1
Probably have more luck getting FreeNas to run. If the server is 10 years old I highly doubt drivers for Server 2019 are available.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Might have to look into it. It's an hp proliant dl180g6. I think it currently has Windows server 2008 r2 on it now. Price is right with freenas lol.

The other question, the robocopy vs veamm free edition, how does that work as far as file/folder length etc? Haven't used robocopy before, but looks like I'd just want to schedule it for each night and run the /mir switch with the option to copy everything into the Dropbox directory. Gives me a project though. May have to set up a test box tomorrow or on Monday to tinker with before I get further into it.

The raid battery was very much rigged I'll admit.

Don't know if that image will show up. But basically pulled the charging board from the old raid battery, the connector is cut off of a battery for a door alarm and soldered to the 2 points of the charging board, then the battery is taped down to the old battery so it can sit in the mount.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/liggxp4qqvcsvmn/Screenshot_20200227-182947_Teams.jpg?dl=0

For whatever reason my photos didn't show up.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Tinkered a bit with freenas on a test box, and didn't have much luck getting it to boot up. Could be that PC is not a good candidate though. The thought did occur to me however, we do have a server 2008 system where a sql database lives that supports our mail system. Think SQL Express. We tried at one point to move that database to another system with full blown SQL server software on it, only to spend something like 3 hours and be told by their support that SQL Server wasn't actually supported. When I say mail system, it's like 3 PC's that connect to a database for shipping information. 1 of those has a mail scanner attached.

Since the HP is something like 10 years old, if it would run, is there anything wrong with running Windows 10 on that box if it would work? For a system that physically is a server, but that is as old as this system is, don't really want to spend a lot of money on a system that would basically have files copied to it just to send to dropbox and have like 3 computers connect to it. Or should I just recommend to bite the bullet and get the full server OS? Or is this idea outside the license terms? Don't want to cross any lines. Just like I said, this is all I forsee this box being used for, and would hate to put much into it.

Or if it would work better, memory strikes me again that we have another older server that is powered down no longer used. I think it is an older Poweredge 710 with only about 4gb of ram and less storage than this hp. I think I have another system or 2 that aren't being used that I can take ram from(we keep some of older equipment still in the rack since our systems sit in a room behind glass, so at least it doesn't look so empty if we leave some systems racked).

Maybe I could put a copy of Windows 10 onto it and let it be for the mail server, and the HP only for dropbox. Thoughts? We are a small shop, with some older equipment that I'm thinking we can repurpose/scavenge things out of trying to get the most of what we have but not to put a lot of cash down if not required. If we went this route, would obviously use Windows 10 Pro. Just wondering if I looked at this route if there is a good reason not to. Especially for the first system where all the server would literally do would be to sync to dropbox for the rest of it's days.

Will probably try to pull out a different system as a test box later and tinker with FreeNAS. The system I was trying to work with is a Dell Precision from 4-5 years ago. I got it to actually install FreeNAS, but kept landing on a login prompt and couldn't proceed.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

So tinkering some more. Apparently hp wishes you to use an spp disk or something that I don't have for this server. Apparently to download it you need a support agreement and or active warranty which I don't have for this system that's 10 years old. What to do.

Anyway the long and short is that I can use the raid card built in utility to create a 10tb drive. However, due to the drive not being formatted as gpt, I can't use all the space. Windows creates a 2tb partition and I have 7tb more just sitting out there.

I went back into the utility and deleted the raid 5 I'd created, my options were raid 5, raid 0, raid 1+0 and one other. Would have liked to have used raid 6 but apparently without paying for more licensing this card won't do that.

So my thought is ok, I've got 6 2tb drives. This system will basically only have files sent to it via robocopy, and then sync those to Dropbox. Not a huge load imo.

So I set 2 of the drives as raid 1+0. The other 4 I set as a raid 5. I get the idea of raid 10 sort of. But how does that work with 2 drives? Treat it as raid 1?

Note, when I set it this way, my space is not 2tb, which is the size of the drives used. Instead my available space shows as 1tb. Just under, but not going to worry for the os drive.

My question is then, it appears that the card is using a combination of striping and mirroring to give me a 1tb drive? Will this act like raid 1 for redundancy sake?

Interesting note also, setup told me Windows could not install on that drive. But then it allowed me to install anyway. It shows as well that my larger data drive is only 2tb due to it being an mbr drive so will try to convert that. Further note, attempted to convert using diskpart and the os will not do it. The os acts like the drive is media such as cdrom etc and won't do it. I guess if all else fails is there a way to bypass raid card and set up software raid, which isn't my favorite idea.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

One other thing, I don't believe that this server has a uefi bios. System is go proliant dl180 g6 rack mount. Currently has 6 2tb drives installed. Can hold 8 drives however.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

I think I have solved it. So in case anyone is curious on this hp server. Yes, it will run Windows 10 pro.

What I did was to go back into the raid config, deleted all of my raid configs. I then started by creating a raid 1+0 for the os. It seems to be functioning as raid 1. I can see the full 2tb of space, the os sees it as a single drive.

I saved that, installed Windows 10 pro clean on those 2 disks.

Rebooted. Went back into raid config and told it that I'd like to use the other 4 disks as a raid 5. Saved the config, and rebooted again.

This time when I loaded up Windows and went to administration tools in control panel and into computer management and then disk management, the system told me a disk needed to be initialized and offered the option of mbr or of gpt. I selected got and it sees a full 5.5tb.

Since I have 2 bays open, we'd recently purchased 2 drive caddy's for about 8 dollars each. I think what I will do is to scrounge up a couple of 1tb drives. Use those as my is in a mirror and raid 5 the other drives for 10tb of space.

 

[MDD1963]

NethServer is CentOS -based....(if would prefer to avoid cost of WS2019 and/or CALs, but, of course, go with your preference)

 

[coffee]

My client servers all run CentOS. Im using Dell servers. Backups from the raids are rsynced to external drives. I wrote up a backup script that also checks the external drives before the backup starts so there are no filesystem errors. The clients just swap out the external drive and take it home at night for off site storage.

For maintenance, The servers email me the backup logs plus system health logs to alert me if any drives are marked as failed or failing plus any other hardware issues like the power supplies.

You could even do offsite backups by rsyncing over a vpn connection to a offsite server daily.

The servers handle email, Calendars, File sharing, Firewall, Routing ect...

 

[Yosebas84]

For the cost of the ws2019 license, i would much prefer to buy a synology DS218+ and use veeam (backup & recovery free version), you can set the drives to mirror (raid 1) and can also sync to Dropbox (backup redundancy).