mjt5282

your plan requires very careful use of the elevated "root" permissions in order to clone the dying drives. The linux "dd" command is used to clone drives (see: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/disk_cloning ) . The command itself is simple, but you have to be exact and specific with the command's arguments, otherwise you can destroy a healthy drive by cloning the wrong drives.I am not familiar with Synology (my first nas was a Infrant (now ReadyNAS) I eventually built my own NAS and run ZFS raidz2 with it. I am familiar with the BSD/Linux command line, though. Feel free to PM me if you need advice or help.

some people store their "cold storage" backup hard drives in hardened ammo cases. They claim it would protect the data from EMP blasts. tape storage may also be viable in that case. however, if there is ever a EMP above North America, it would probably be several years until power is restored. It would be hard to wait that long to check the disks in storage!!!

staying on topic ... I have four different ZFS datasets, music (44.1/16 bit CD rips), musicLiveRecordings (44.1/16 bit ROIO's downloads or self made recordings), musicHD (>44.1,>16 bit recordings), musicHDmultichannel (>44.1,>16 bit 5.1 or 7.1 recordings). ripping is done by DBPoweramp, naming convention is : Artist Name/Album Name (Release Year)/NN Trackname.flac . Different versions are saved in parenthesis after Album name. I can find recordings quickly but use Roon for indexing and presenting music so folder order doesn't matter. Roon presents albums and ROIO's in mostly correct order, Sonos alphabetically If I remember correctly (away on vacation).

I have several backups of my ripped and purchased audio files (offsite, cold storage, live copy) and also subscribe to several streaming music services. I usually discover new music through the streaming sites, for music and artists I enjoy, I still buy the audio CD. My children also use the streaming music more than buying CD's, which they claim is an anachronism. I tend to use streaming with say, Apple Music, when I'm traveling, instead of bringing my old iPod classic.

B2 is designed to backup servers over the internet / cloud , is compatible with rclone (which I already had written unix script wrappers), and has scalable, predictable pricing. B2 has a command line interface (which I don't use, because i use rclone's API and scripting). I believe BB Personal is for Mac/PC backup. I store all my audio files on Freebsd ZFS.

ZFS checksums all its writes to the disk and has the ability to do a scheduled scrub which rechecks all the checksums and so discovers and potentially repairs any file system bitrot (if your vdev is setup with mirrored or Z1/Z2/Z3 redundancy. So, I would recommend a ZFS based file server such as FreeNAS or FreeBSD for all "live" and backup file systems.

I have about 2.2TB stored at BackBlaze B2, for about $11/month. Astroboy has at least 20X the amount of storage, so if you are looking for offsite cloud storage, it would be very expensive. You are in the territory of "build your own backup server" because of the amount of files required for backup. A ~90 TB home file server(s) is within the realm of possibility now, considering 10TB drives are shipping finally. The disk and RAM requirements would be considerable - do you have a RoonServer pointed at the storage?

rather than wait for amazon to change it's collective mind, I have cancelled my Amazon Cloud account and uploaded my data to Backblaze B2. It works perfectly with rclone (important for my pre-written scripts and workflow) and is affordable for offsite cloud cold storage. It satisfies my need for off-site storage of music related files and even now is a repository for my Roon library backup offsite. Crucially, it is focused on cloud backup and is unlikely to change pricing policies midstream ala ACD. It also has additional snapshotting functionality, which ACD lacked.

Amazon Drive (formerly known as Amazon Cloud Drive) does *NOT* have history as part of its service. I rely on my primary ZFS raidz2 + snapshot system + my backup ZFS raidz2 + snapshots to provide a rolling, 30 day available snapshot history. rclone provides a scrip-table way to upload the current version of my music + files offsite to Amazon's backup system. Rclone also supports other cloud drive providers, including Google, Backblaze, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc. Alternative providers probably will cost much more than $60/year (which is what Amazon charges).

I created a Freenas jail (called 'util'), mounted my music files in the jail, and run a nightly script in cron to upload any changes to my ripped files to Amazon Drive. I use rclone, there is a freebsd port so it all runs very smoothly (and automatically). I am speaking at the zfs user conference 2017 11 AM March 16th on large scale home lab backups. Amazon Cloud Drive backups will definitely be one of the techniques I cover.

I run FreeNas (FreeBSD derivative) with about 2Tb of ZFS music data (flac mostly) and RoonServer in a virtualized machine with memory allocated for it. FreeNas 10 will also support Docker containers "out of the box" which will make it easier to deploy software to run in parallel to serving files out via NFS, SMB, AFS. ZFS conveniently supports integrated checksums, snapshots, mirroring and RAID5/6 similar modes. Also, mixed drive and SSD configurations for performance flexibility.

my analysis of the press release is that they are doubling-down on Streaming, and investing in voice-recognition development. Most of my friends who own Sonos are streaming nearly 100%. I am the OCD LAN-streaming lossless outlier.

I would suggest paying "extra" for ECC ram when you implement ZFS. its not much more and can avoid rare error corruption conditions (there is a lot of info on this on the 'Net). Also, plex and mrtg run great in jails on my FreeNas server.

I don't run it myself, but it looks like its pretty easy to install in a freenas jail : [Tutorial] Installing MinimServer on FreeNAS or FreeBSD

I treat FreeNas as an file server appliance - I have not attempted to customize the GUI. If you are deep in the unix/BSD foo, perhaps FreeBSD is a better fit for customization. OTOH, the next iteration of FreeNas 10.X includes a completely redesigned GUI, and CLI, but it won't beta for a few months. it will also include virtualization technology that will allow linux OS in the new jails-ish technology. Looking forward to running Roon Server headless on this.