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Catchup

About a year ago, I started wishing that I had some sort of reliable and redundant backup for the computers in the house. So much so, that I spent almost all of my 2012 computer budget on completing the project. Instead of replacing one of our aging computers, I went ahead and built a NAS. I wrote a series of articles documenting much of my process. Because the amount of time this project has been in flight a summary was in order. For those of you interested in the nitty-gritty details here's a detailing of each of the articles in this series:

• Building a NAS: Choosing Hardware
• Building a NAS: Assembly & Configuration
• Backing up Windows Machines to FreeNAS: Part One
• Backing up Windows Machines to FreeNAS: Part Two
• Backing up Windows Machines to FreeNAS: Part Three

Hardware

Originally, I had started out by being very interested in the fantastic products that Drobo has been selling. Over the years I have been following what they have brought to market and have always had an eye on their products. Unfortunately for me, I felt that they were a little on the expensive side and outside of what I could justify spending.

Fortunately for me, open source alternatives exist. A friend of mine wound up introducing me to FreeNAS, which offered me many of the features that Drobo offered and a number more. I wound up building a machine using a dual core 1.66GHz mini-ITX motherboard, 8 gigabytes of RAM, four different 2.0 TB drives for storage, a flash drive to house FreeNAS and tucked all of that into a nice little case from Lian-Li .

The Great Hard Drive Shortage of 2011

One of the things that really set me back in this build was that I wound up paying a premium for the hard drives. This is due to the hard drive shortage of 2011. I had bought a 2 TB drive almost a year prior for cheaper than I wound up getting any of the drives for my FreeNAS box. In total, hard drives wound up accounting for 61% of the total hardware cost.

Power Consumption

Typically, I would expect most FreeNAS users to be building their NAS boxes out of recycled hardware and spare parts. Because I've been on a laptop-buying spree the past few years, I did not have the cache of spare parts I would have needed to build the NAS. Because I had to buy new parts, I tried to pick a low-power motherboard and power supply. I did this primarily for one reason: to save electricity. Ideally, the power I save would eventually pay for my hardware. A friend of mine owns a Kill-a-Watt and he recently built a fascinating arcade cabinet out of recycled computer parts which he also uses as a NAS.

We hooked both his NAS and my FreeNAS machine up to the Kill-A-Watt ran some file read/write operations to each NAS and tried to make sure that all four drives were active. Over a two or three hour time span, my friend's NAS was using around 99.2 watts and my FreeNAS was using around 41.2 watts. Based on my latest electrical bill that works out to a savings of nearly $75.00 a year by going with the low power motherboard. In comparison with the Drobo S the FreeNAS box uses 27% less power (41.2 watts vs 56 watts) with all four drives in action.

Software

Ultimately, I wound up obtaining two different types of software for this project. Firstly, the software which managed the NAS, FreeNAS and secondly Genie Timeline Pro for backing up the machines in my house. Of the two, Genie Timeline Pro was the easiest to set up and use, but I would hope and expect that to be the case. FreeNAS was more difficult to configure and get set up, but none of the difficulties I had were related to the product itself; my obstacles were a result of my general unfamiliarity with the Linux universe. I have not had to touch the FreeNAS configuration since I finished it back in the spring.

I have been running Genie Timeline Professional on my primary desktop since the beginning of March and this weekend,I went through and installed the software on my laptop and on my wife's desktop. In addition to that, I created a "home" folder on the FreeNAS box for each user to store files on. Right now, there's a little over three terabytes of free space still available. I have been both lucky and smart and have not had to recover anything from my backup. But now that I have made that claim I am pretty certain that a data disaster is in my immediate future.

Total Cost

I wound up splurging on an expensive case, and the shortage caused my four hard drives' price to be inflated. In the end, I wound up spending just under $1000 total. This includes all of the hardware, which included nearly five hundred dollars worth of hard drives, three licenses of Genie Timeline Pro, and then three upgrade licenses to Genie Timeline Pro 2012 which came out recently.

In comparison, the comparable Drobo devices range between $400 and $850 dollars, which is between $100 and $550 dollars more than I spent on the hardware that is running my NAS. On top of that, my machine has gigabit Ethernet and room for at least two more hard drives, you have to move all the way up into Drobo's enterprise product offerings to find one with a gigabit option with as many drives. If you bought the least expensive Drobo device available, spent the same amount on hard drives and the Genie Timeline Pro licenses you would wind up with a fancy 4 drive redundant mass storage USB device that would have cost around $100 more than I wound up spending and that device would not have any room for additional drives down the road. Plus that Drobo device would wind up costing around 35% more in electricity costs.

Conclusion

Because of FreeNAS being Open Source I was able to save a ton of money in this build. This savings enabled me to build a storage device that beats the pants off the devices I compared it to. If you are interested in building a device out of spare parts, I suggest strongly that you take power consumption into consideration and try to include that into your pricing calculations. Now that an entire year has passed, hopefully low-power parts have decreased in price and incorporated additional capacity. I would encourage everyone to consider FreeNAS for their own attached storage needs.

Catch Up

First, a bit of catch up. As a bit of full disclosure, my blog was offline for around six months. Nothing major, just a hardware migration that wound up taking longer and falling off the priority list for awhile. Parts one and two of this blog were written and posted prior to that migration. Part three was 90% written and was waiting to be completed.

In the first and second articles in this series I expressed my desire and plan to create a “stupid easy” backup process for our PCs at home using FreeNAS to store the backups and Genie Timeline Pro to create and sustain the backups.

So far I’ve covered, configuring a compressed share on the FreeNAS box, installing and creating the first backup using Genie Timeline Pro, and how to recover files in a couple different scenarios.

Disaster Recovery

Some of the times, there’s been some sort of a disaster: you lose a hard drive or delete your Windows directory. Or you might be doing something like upgrading your primary hard drive or restoring your old backup to a brand new PC. In these cases, you will need to use the Disaster Recovery option.

I thought about doing something dramatic on my own PC to demonstrate the disaster recovery option. Perhaps deleting my Windows directory, or throwing my hard drive from a moving car but I thought that might have been a bad idea and would open myself up for all sorts of e-ridicule. Ultimately, I decided it might be easier if instead I created a brand new Virtual Machine using VirtualBox. However,I suspect because of the drastic hardware differences between the VM and my desktop PC it caused some problems. Instead, I took the time to build a brand new Windows 7 installation on the Virtual machine, I installed a couple of games from my Steam Library, copied over some of my random files from My Documents and finally backed up the entire machine using Genie Timeline Pro. After brushing off the six months of dust that my VM had accrued, I renewed my Windows 7 Trial Key and installed all of my system updates. To simulate a disaster, I deleted the primary partition and confirmed that the machine would not boot back up.

I booted off of my Disaster Recovery ISO I made earlier. From the main screen, I mapped a drive to my Backups share on my FreeNAS machine. After that, I partitioned and formatted the virtual hard drive. From there, I followed the disaster recovery wizard. I selected the backup, then picked which restore point to use in the restoration. Beyond that, I selected to restore the master boot record and to replace everything. The backup began copying. After giving Genie Timeline some time, the machine was restored and ready for a reboot. The machine booted right up into Windows without any issues.

Upgrade to Genie Timeline Professional 2012

A new version of the product, Genie Timeline Professional 2012 came out while I was working on this post. When the new version was available I decided it made sense to keep it current. The upgrade was effortless. According to the product sheet, the new version is two times faster and features machine level de-duplication to save both disk space and time.

Next Steps

My next steps are to “roll out” Genie Timeline Professional 2012 to my other computers in the house (three total) and get them backing up as well. I plan to wrap up this series of blogs with a summary article where I can talk about the amount of money I spent, the features of my solution, and how much time it wound up consuming get it set up and sustained.

Summary

My original intent was to write an article mostly targeted at people with Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, like my FreeNAS device but because the NAS supports CIFS so well, the majority of his article can easily apply to just about any storage device on a Windows machine.

In my previous article I talked about my desire to have backups be “stupid easy.” What I did not want to have to do is worry about scheduling backups, or digging through obtuse applications in order to restore from my backups like all the more traditional backup software I have had experience with.

With that in mind, I fired up my incredibly exhaustive, patent pending research process. I punched my different criteria into Google and he told me that the product I wanted to use was Apple’s Time Machine, but because I do not want to buy an Apple, Google also recommended that I check out Genie Timeline. As usual, Google was correct.

Genie Timeline comes in several flavors, including Free and Pro (comparison) and one of my criteria was a cheap (preferably free) solution. However, another one of my criteria was also full Disaster Recovery capability. I wanted to be able to restore an empty computer from my backup in the event of a total worst case scenario. Ultimately, I decided that I would download Genie Timeline Pro and buy licenses for each of my PCs if I liked it.

In this article I’ll talk about creating a share on my FreeNAS box with compression enabled, installing and configuring Genie Timeline, completing your first backup and restoring files from a functioning machine.

Installation and Configuration

Firstly, I leveraged the configuration I had already done to my NAS. I already had a volume created, which was configured using a ZFS file system and RAID Z2, which is most similar to Raid 6. The purpose of this configuration was to be able to survive the loss of two drives simultaneously. On that volume, I created a folder for Backups and then a sub folder for each machine I intended to back up. I set up a CIFS share on the Backups folder, and I mapped a drive (B: for Backups) to the share I created for my primary PC. Because of the number and volume of files to be backed up, compression was an important consideration for me. FreeNAS is quite handy in this arena. My entire Backups folder is a ZFS Dataset and there are compression options you can set on each ZFS Dataset. In my case, I decided to go ahead and use gzip-6 for compression in that dataset. I know that that extra tiny little bit of compression comes at the cost of more time and CPU cycles, but I felt that after the first backup was done the incremental activity would be occasional enough I could afford taking a small performance hit in writing data to the NAS.

Installing Genie Timeline Pro was a breeze, like most applications these days. It was mostly, double click the installer and then mindlessly click “next” and “I Agree” when appropriate. About the only alarming thing is that at some point in the install, your Windows Explorer will restart.

Upon successful installation, Genie Timeline will launch directly into the Backup Setup Wizard. Of all the features of Genie Timeline, this is the one I appreciated most. The wizard comprised of three steps:

1. Selecting the Backup Drive: This was pretty easy. Since I had already mapped a drive to the Backups folder I created on my FreeNAS box, I just went ahead and picked that mapped drive (B:)
2. Selecting the Data: In this step, there are two options: Smart Selection and My Computer. Smart Selection features “categories” of files (see page 20 of the Genie Timeline Pro User Manual for details). My Computer allows you to go through and check boxes for what you want to back up. You can mix and match between these two screens to pick your ideal backup. Because “stupid easy” is my objective, I chose Smart Selection and grabbed the following categories; Disaster Recovery, Email, Desktop, My Documents, Office Files, Financial Files, Pictures, Music, Videos, Bookmarks, eBooks and PDF, and Miscellaneous.
3. Set Backup Options: On the third and final step, you get to choose whether to compress and encrypt your backups. Since I was doing compression on my FreeNAS box, I decided to go ahead and leave this option unchecked. I found out later, that leaving the compression and encryption options disabled made it very easy for me to poke around and look at the backup files. In the event I needed to restore something manually, I could do it.

After the wizard completes, the backup begins automatically. As the backup is running, there are some more advanced configuration steps that you can do via the Timeline Pro dashboard. For example, via the Dashboard’s Preferences menu, there’s an Auto-Exclude option. In here you can create rules for folders you may not want to be backed up. To test this feature out, I added some folders to that list like my Dropbox folder and other folder(s) that had files in them that I had backed up elsewhere or that I just do not care too much about..

While the backup was running, I decided this was a good time to go ahead and create a recovery disk. In the Dashboard, beneath Tools there is an option for Disaster Recovery startup Disk. Selecting that gives you three recovery disk options: a Virtual Partition, USB Drive, and ISO Image. For my purposes, I decided to go ahead and create an ISO image. However, a Virtual Partition would be handy in the event of anything short of losing a hard drive and I may install that down the road.

As is expected with every first full back up you do, the initial backup took quite some time. After that backup completes Timeline then monitors your system as things change and it backs them up as they change. For some of the Smart Selections (e.g. Disaster Recovery), it does backups less frequently, since those files tend to be more static. When it was all completed, this backup took up roughly 170GB on my FreeNAS box. Overall, the size of the backup was roughly 5% to 10% bigger than the total space used on my primary hard drive.

Restoration from a Functioning PC

Typically, most of your restorations are needed while your computer is still working. Sometimes it is because you accidentally deleted something or that you somehow you managed to mangle some file so badly that it would take you days to repair it.However in other situations you have suffered a disaster or inflicted a disaster upon yourself. Every backup program should handle both of these scenarios. And I will cover restorations of each type in this and the next article.

Restoring a Deleted File

Restoring a deleted file was simple. In the Windows Explorer, browse to the location where the file was located, right-click and select the Genie Timeline Explorer context menu and select “View all Deleted Files.” A dialog pops up, with the deleted files and a restore button. Once choosing restoration, you’re prompted to restore to the original location or a new location, which you can provide.

Restoring a Mangled File

Restoring a mangled file was a pleasant surprise. I created a text file before the backup, then made an edit to it after the backup completed which promptly got backed up. I made a third change to that file and then used the right-click context menu to select “Timeline Explorer”. A new Windows Explorer window opened up with a timeline across the top. By selecting different points in that timeline, you are able to view the document, and when you find the correct version, you can elect to restore that file as well. Again, when doing a restoration you have the option to restore to the original location or provide a new location to restore to. In this way, Genie Timeline Pro works very similarly to a revision control system and it is incredibly handy.

Coming up Next

In my next article (hopefully in a day or two), I will cover restoring a machine in a simulated “disaster.” Plus, I’ll touch on a few other observations, including my final thoughts on creating a pretty simple plan for managing backups of our computers at home and using FreeNAS in order to store those backups.

Introduction

As you might remember from my articles about building my own Network Attached Storage (NAS) using FreeNAS (part 1, part 2), my primary motivation was to come up with a redundant solution for storage of backups.

As a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to PCs for nearly two decades, I’ve grown relatively unattached to much of my data. Generally speaking, my “disaster” recovery plan was to replace failed hardware and cope with losing all of my data. Thankfully, I have very rarely needed to use this plan because it is very stupid and useless.

I am not ignorant; for years I have realized that my disaster plan at home is stupid and useless. But, I have always wound up doing an analysis. In every scenario that I imagined, it always wound up being more work to create, maintain and recover than it would be to just start from scratch. As long as I only had one or two PCs devoid of irreplaceable data and I was the only user, this would work out just fine. Ultimately, this paradigm is not sustainable. I have accrued multiple computers, these computers each contain more and more irreplaceable files, and most importantly, I got married and now I’m supporting two users.

It was inevitable for me and ultimately it is inevitable for everyone - you will lose data. It is not a question of “If” but a question of “When?” Your data is constantly at risk, whether caused by a hardware failure, a careless revision or a reckless deletion. Too much can go wrong, and the data is too important to ignore doing backups.

Requirements

At the very least, I’d think the bare minimum would be for every computer user to periodically back up their “user profile” type folders. These are the folders on your computer which contain documents, pictures, music and videos that can not be easily replaced. Hopefully, everyone’s made it to the point where they are saving those files in a central folder or at the very least everyone can find those folders pretty easily on their computer. Operating Systems have gone a long way to forcing you into doing this. That way, if you ever lost everything on your computer it’d be a matter of re-installing the Operating System, any missing applications, and restoring your profile(s) from the backup.

In my particular case, I require a more robust backup solution. In my brainstorming on backups, I made a list of features that I considered to be “must-haves”:

• Redundant, fault tolerant backup storage (solved by the FreeNAS machine)
• Low Cost ($0-$75 per license)
• Automated and Scheduled
• Integrated into the Windows Explorer
• Differential backups to provide version history on backed up files
• Restore an entire machine in one-step

Aside from the first requirement, none of these should be extraordinarily rare. I anticipate that the more of the features I want that are included in a product, the more the cost will go up. This is about the only concession that I’m willing to make in this regard.

Research

When discussing this with a friend, he said what I needed to do was to trade my PCs in and buy an Apple instead. Apparently Time Machine comes default with MacOS and is the gold standard of what I call “stupid easy” backups. From what I have read, this feature sounds great and sounds like it would be easy to have Time Machine write its backups out to a Network-Attached-Storage like FreeNas. However, I am not nearly creative or hip enough to own any Apple products, and more importantly, I am an old dog to whom it is difficult to teach new tricks. For the foreseeable future, I will continue to be a Windows user.

Off and on, I’ve been reading other blogs, Internet forums and PC publications looking for “free” backup software that does what I want. In researching products, I focused primarily on things that had free versions or were completely free. Ultimately, there are literally dozens and dozens of free or low-cost backup solutions out there. Because of the numerous options, I focused my research in on the following products.

• DriveImage XML: I started off with DriveImage XML because it was a package I had tinkered with in the past and it was free. It ticked off the majority of my must-haves, but lacked nice Windows Explorer integration or the ability to do differential backups.
• EaseUs To-Do Backup Free: A very simple to use backup utility that ticked off all of the check marks on my list except for Windows Explorer integration.
• Windows Backup and Restore: Pretty simple to use and set up, I like that it has some of the Windows Explorer integration features I was after, but this software is only included in certain versions of Windows Vista, and all versions of Windows 7. Because I still have older PCs, I chose not to use this.
• Genie Timeline Free: I found this product through a page on Superuser.com. It seems to be the best Time Machine equivalent for the average Windows user.

Ultimately, I have decided to to purchase Genie Timeline Pro, the more feature packed version of Genie Timeline. As of the time this blog was published, Genie9 is running a 50% off promotion on this software.

To Be Continued

All the “fun” work is over and this is where the rubber meets the road. Over the next week I will work on installing and configuring Genie Timeline Pro and blogging about how it works backing up to the FreeNAS machine.