Gadgetory

excellent so a few weeks back I built a Nass that is network-attached storage it's been running FreeNAS and last you saw I got as far as assembling the system and getting it booted up that I went just fine fortunately but I wanted to use my Nass for some useful tasks and that list of tasks spoils down to four things one is basic easy access to mass storage on my local network at home which is pretty much what an ass should do two is regular backups of my important irreplaceable personal files like photos three is remote access so I can download stuff while I'm off on the road and then four is media server capabilities I can now do all of those things with my Nass thanks largely in part to several videos and websites that taught me how I'm going to walk you through what I set up and for each topic there's a link in the description to the article or video that helped me figure out all of this stuff since I'm kind of learning as I go so feel free to check those out down below don't accidentally click the like button while you're down there though as that should only be done intentionally so mine ass is currently deployed in my computer room connected via a gigabit switch to my home network for all this setup I accessed it via the Chrome browser on my primary desktop PC running Windows seven before I set the NASS up to do any of my four things though I first ran updates we're up to FreeNAS nine point three point one now and then I needed to create a ZFS volume across my 4wd read for terabyte hard drives here is where I encountered my first problem after going to storage volume manager and trying to create a raid Z to volume across my four four terabyte drives I got an error unable to GPT format the disk ata three these drives are used they were formerly in a raid 5 array and to be honest I should have cleaned them before installation but unfortunately even the wipe command that you can access under view disks in freenas wasn't working anyway i internet searched that error i found a website bit fix table ee with a fix so i pulled up the shell and FreeNAS entered the commands listed on the site and i was able to wipe the disks and proceed i then pulled up volume manager i named my volume big i dragged over my four drives and FreeNAS auto selected raids e2 for me which is actually the configuration that I wanted because it means that I will have up to two drives be able to fail without losing data I do lose half of my capacity though kind of like with raid 10 so I will end up having only terabytes of storage which should be enough so with my big volume set up it is time for the first thing the most basic thing in ash should do gave locally accessible mass storage over your home network Wendell and Logan from Tech Syndicate were immensely helpful with their videos on FreeNAS here this seems basic but it doesn't necessarily just pop up after FreeNAS is installed I had to create a dataset on the new volume this one was for media like movies TV and music so I called it media and before I moved on I changed the permissions to allow guest access that made a repository on the big volume for data and to access it over my home network I went to sharing and then add a windows CIFS share and then I browse until I found that media dataset on the big volume and then connected the two together you can give it a unique name here if you want it to have a different name as it appears over your network and don't forget again to allow guest access keep in mind that this is the quick and less secure method of setup you'd want to add users and permissions and FreeNAS for these datasets in the future rather than just leaving them open to all guests on the network but again this is a fast and easy way to get set up now if I access my home network via one of my Windows PCs I can see my FreeNAS system there even in it there's my newly created media shared folder you can create subfolders for different types of media as you might expect so I just started to drag and drop my movies music and TV shows over to them and the thing one was complete thing too is backups and whereas I eventually want to have another FreeNAS box in a remote location that syncs with this one my immediate concern was protection from viruses and malicious software like cryptolocker that could compromise my data tech syndicate to the rescue once again with their snapshots walkthrough freenas can take snapshots of your data at regular intervals and the snapshots are read-only for your protection since my media collection is replaceable and it's also backed up elsewhere I created a new data set called records to use for my more important files like African film scripts and my scandalous partially nude selfie collection before adding the windows CIFS share for this data set though i jumped over to snapshots to add a periodic snapshot task for records I stuck with two weeks to keep each snapshot and once a day seemed about right so now every day the contents of this folder will be backed up via a snapshot and these snapshots tab the first one popped up after a couple minutes and after setting share permissions I was able to access the records folder over network via Windows Explorer if you're in Windows Explorer you can go to properties and the previous versions tab will also show me the staff shots and allow me to restore from them if I want to I have backups now and thing to is completely to set up remote data access for thing the three I used a FreeNAS plugin for BitTorrent sync BitTorrent sync has apps you can get for just about anything Windows Mac Android iOS Linux and more so once I got it running with help directly from FreeNAS team's YouTube channel and they're very thorough video I can use BitTorrent sync to synchronize data that means that I can set up a folder on the nest with a bunch of raw video files for example use the BitTorrent sync GUI to pull up a shareable key or you can also do a link or a QR code and then I can send that to a friend my editor Joe who handles about three to five videos a month for me in this case who would load the BitTorrent sync app on their device enter that key or scan the QR code if it's a smartphone and then mine ass will sync the files directly to their device with no middleman or cloud service needed it's not quite the same as a service like Dropbox and there is another plugin for free and asked called own cloud that is a bit more flexible for this type of usage but since exposing your home storage server to the Internet does involve some security pitfalls I've decided to set own cloud aside for potential future investigation BitTorrent sync will get the job done for now and if you hadn't already noticed I'm sparing you the installation walkthrough for this one because there are quite a few steps I will point out that I've added one more drive to my freenas rig though a 32 gig SSD that I'm using for jails jails are basically like quarantined areas that allow processes to run in a safe environment separate from the rest of the system you can create an independent data set for a jail on your main volume but from what I've read using it faster SSD for jails can help with some plugins like plex media server aka thing for which we can move on to now because thanks to BitTorrent sync thing 3 is also completed plex media server is more than just a plugin for FreeNAS but thanks to the plug-in you can easily set up FreeNAS to be a plex media server I did this with ease thanks to a great video by byte my bits that walked me through it and once you have a plex media server on your network set up and attached to your media collection you can use plex client software to enjoy that content from just about any device like literally from a Mac or a PC to a tablet to all variety of smartphones to Xbox and Playstation 4 even more specific devices like amazon firetv chromecast Roku and Nvidia shield you just have to create a Plex account and then you have access to what is essentially a glorified media player but it also pulls metadata and thumbnails from the Internet's and it does sorting and it lets you do stuff like seamlessly continue watching a video from your smartphone by throwing it up on your TV not actually throwing up but like virtually tossing it from one device to the other device you get my points it even encrypts the data between the server and the clients and there are social sharing features that I haven't even really messed with yet I do not have Plex premium yet but I did get these smartphone app for five bucks and I already really like it it's fast and responsive and it just seems pretty awesome I feel like I should have tried this out a while back to be honest but what can you do and oh yeah thing for is now also complete and those are four amazing things you can do with an S thank you very much everyone for watching this video if you enjoyed it don't forget to hit that like button you can also support me by using my amazon link 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