PsychoWards

Just to clear things up, I was only talking about encrypting local datasets and not buddy backup. 🙂 No, you only need to have the keys once, when mounting the dataset to a new server or fresh install, afterwards you can save them in the OS and don't need them anymore. This will not be a problem with local UI dashboard. It might be that it's just stored in a Vault on the Hexos Server and you can retrieve them from there, or that during the setup, which requires an Internet connection anyway, they are automagically fetched from there or sth similar. Or the Eshtek team is not going to store the keys at all for us, I mean we are only talking possibilities and dreams at the moment 🙂 But, as @TheGlitch already mentioned, if you have them in a vault and that vault is an app in Hexos as part of the encrypted dataset, you are out of luck. Also, in case where the Hexos Server gets compromised, and the keys leaked, for local datasets this should be less of a concern, because typically, they shouldn't even be accessible from the outside in the first place and 2nd you can easily change them. And you can even make the storage of the keys optional.

Hey, You don't need to take care of this for the Hexos curated apps, as this is part of the Hexos install skript. Storage paths are also taken care of, so that it's a real 1 click install and you are done and the app is running. Of course, if needed, you can still tweak everything before or after installation.

As much as I like the idea of encrypted datasets (i'm using them myself), I fear that it will cause a not insignificant amount of headaches and data loss. Seeing how many users currently are just reinstalling Hexos if something is not working as they expect, currently, they just nees to mount the pools again and no harm no foul. But with encrypted datasets, where they didn't save the keys or have the keys saved on the encrypted dataset themselves it's bye bye data. So if we go done the path of encrypted datasets, we need to have a way to easily manage the decryption keys. Maybe there will be an option to store them on the Hexos Server and use them from there if anything ever goes wrong with a server. If not, a lot of people are not going to remember where they put those keys X years ago, which are now standing between them and their data. Don't get me wrong, I think those are definitely valid points, but such a crucial part requires a basically fool proof setup to not cause any harm. 🙂

Hey, You can only expand your Pool if your drive has the same or higher capacity then the lowest drive of your pool. So if you want to expand your current pool you need at least 4TB drives. Drives with more than 4TB capacity will not give you more storage then a 4TB drive because the lowest size drive will always be determining factor for the size of your pool. With your 2 500GB drives you will only be able to create a mirrored 500GB pool.

Hey, No, don't restart regularly, high memory usage is good, because unused memory = wasted memory! Hexos is using the memory for the ARC cache, this is a read only cache where Hexos is preloading files which it believes you are using next and can then deliver those files from the memory instead of having to read them from the drives. Depending on your current usage you will not notice any performance boost with more memory, but you might future proof it. Memory prices are currently going through the roof, only buy memory if it's not overpriced.

Oh nice thanks, yes that works.

Can you please also post more details on your HDDs? Those might be SMR drives which will likely cause a lot of (performance) issues in the future.

Hey, Backups are done over the local network or Internet (which requires additional setup) and are done using the existing network connection. Using an USB cable to connect to your server is not supported. What exactly do you want to backup from your devices? There are different ways and apps, depending on what you want to do. Backing up pictures from your phones (and Mac maybe?) you can use Immich, which is a one click install app in Hexos. For documents you could use something like paperless, which requires manual loading of the files and is more like a document manager, rather then a simple backup solution. And there are other solutions to backup every kind of data. For your family, not living in your house, to be able to backup to your server you need to either setup a VPN or Cloudflare Tunnel or similar. Hexos is using ZFS and in ZFS it's called RaidZ1 and not Raid5 🙂 Also please post your specs of your Server which you want to use, this way we can identify possible incompatibilities and issues beforehand and mitigate them.

Hey, yes this is a good idea, I currently have a similar setup, Hexos as main Server, Unraid as on site backup and a synology NAS as an off-site backup, planing to replace Unraid with Hexos once the HDD prices are normalising again. Let's first start with backups: Since Buddy Backup currently isn't available, you will need to setup the task replication in the truenas GUI to backup to your other Hexos. Since this is not in your local network you need to setup a VPN connection or URL or similar to be able to connect both server together. For the backup to your Unraid, you can use rsync to backup to it. Having app failover is an entire different and way more complex topic. The above backup is only creating snapshot but it's no live backup meaning it cannot be used for app failover since the data is not live. Hexos/Truenas Scale doesn't have app failover support, this is exclusively reserved for the entireprise stuff. I know that some apps have some way to have this, but this depends on the app and requires additional setup per app etc. The easiest thing would likely be running everything in a VM in proxmox and have High Availability setup, but this comes with it's own set of restrictions. Unfortunately, there is no easy or moderate complex way to set up app failver

Truenas itself already offers a lot of possibilities, you have the standard rsync which you can use to backup to virtually any other type of NAS and you have the replication task which you can use to backup to another truenas/hexos server. If you're looking for options for more tech savvy users, truenas already offers them, there is no need to wait for Hexos to implement them. 🙂

The difference is pretty big, while they do the same thing, they do it very differently. Immich just stores all the images in plain on the file system, all the processing is done on server side, you can connect an external library and if your Immich DB or installation becomes corrupted or breaks and there is no more support for Immich you just take the photos folder and move on. But the admin and everyone who's access to the folder can see all the photos of everyone, so privacy is not that great, but administration is easier and recovery in case of an issue is easy. Ente (FunFact: Ente is German for Duck) is all about privacy. The photos are all encrypted on the server and only the client side can decrypt/see the photos. This also means that the client side needs to do all the processing, but therefore the server can be very low spec (although this doesn't matter in our case, because Hexos needs to run in the first place, so HW specs is not really a concern in any way) and it needs S3 storage and requires more setup an administration. However if your Ente DB becomes corrupted or the Ente app breaks or the Ente dev stops and your app becomes unusable, you lose all your photos, because you cannot access it any other way. But until that happens only your client side device can access the photos and no-one else can.

Hey, no this will not work as you've described it. With 2 drives Hexos will automatically create a mirrored pool, meaning your data will be stored on both drives at the same time and you will only have the capacity of 1 drive but you can lose 1 drive without losing data. You cannot create a Pool without parity with more then 1 drive. A RaidZ Pool type cannot be changed after it was created, so you will be stuck with your mirrored pool and you cannot expand it. If you then throw in your 4 drives from the old NAS, Hexos will create a new RaidZ1 pool, which has the capacity of the numbers of drives -1 (capacity of 3 drives in your case). You can then copy the data from your mirrored pool to your RaidZ1 pool. If however, your mirrored pool does not have enough capacity, get yourself a 3. drive to create a RaidZ1 from the beginning, copy your data over and afterwards add your drives from your NAS to the pool or create a new pool. (expanding a pool can only be done with 1 drive at a time and takes some time). Also make sure all your drives have the same capacity or else Hexos will not group them together.

It's always clearly described who gets what, on the main page, in the forum post and in the email. The only way you don't know the different prices is if you just blindly click a link in this forum without reading the corresponding posts. 🙂

1 system/installation requires 1 license. And Buddy Backup is between 2 systems requiring a license each. The owner doesn't matter all you need to have is 2 Hexos installations/servers therefor 2 licence in total and you are good to go for buddy backup.

So, Buddy Backup only works for different users? I bought 2 licenses a year ago to be able to do buddy backup with myself, so that's not possible? I would need to fall back to Replication Task over SSH ?