Snapshots and BTRFS

[Ystebad]

Considering an Unraid build.  Have multiple terabytes of photographs that need the highest level of data security I can muster.

 

I want BTRFS with snapshot support.  I am aware of the developer opinion that bitrot is highly improbable.  My build will use ECC ram.

 

Is this currently possible on Unraid?  If not is it in the development timeline?

[JorgeB]

Btrfs snapshots are supported, but for now only by using the console or a script, currently there's no GUI support, also note that since with Unraid each data disk is an independent filesystem you can only snapshot individual disks or pools, for example for my backups I snapshot each data disk then replicate to another identical server using btrfs send/receive, it's done disk by disk until all disks are replicated.

[Ystebad]

Thank you.  So you have a script that does this?  Management of snapshots then done manually I assume (no daily/weekly/monthly rotations?). Not familiar with rotating snapshots to another disk - coming from Synology business class nas where it’s managed onboard.

[JorgeB]

Yes, for some servers that are always on I have scripts snapshotting the shares once a day (some multiple times a day) then replicate the differences to another server, then have scripts monitoring the free space of the backups storage and deleting older snapshots as needed, this way I usually can go back 30 to 60 days if needed, depending on the share, on my "cold storage" servers that are mostly off I just run the scrip manually to snapshot the disks and replicate when there's enough new data to justify an incremental backup to the backup server.

[Ystebad]

I continue to be concerned about this.  With all the ransomware floating around as well as bitrot, I’m afraid snapshotting has become a primary need for my new server.  Very frustrated that unraid doesn’t natively support this function - I would have made my decision if that were the case.  So now I’m debating having to install and use truenas scale beta.  Grrr.

Edited May 23, 2021 by Ystebad

[JSE]

Snapshotting is perfectly possible with Unraid as was described, there's also the ZFS plugin if you wanna use ZFS. Btrfs is "natively" supported, out of the box just to be clear, there just isn't any exposure by GUI for snapshots. Just login the console and snapshot it.