Home NAS

I figured I would give you an extremely important, life altering, and mind blowing opinion, on setting up a NAS for your home network. And it is...blehhh!

I setup a NAS box using FreeNAS 8.0.2 something or other about a month ago using some spare hardware I had laying around the house. The initial installation wasn't too bad. The real pain didn't kick in until I started implementing features that I wanted. And, in all honesty, it's probably user error. My background is Windows which puts me at a real disadvantage when using Linux\FreeBSD based applications. But we're not going to allow that to stop me from my rant! Here we go...

Creating shares in CIFS that I could show\hide based on the account used to log in took some googling skills and a dash of experimentation.

RSYNCing to an external usb drive formatted with NTFS bumped up my blood pressure. I managed to figure out how to do it from the command line but couldn't figure out how to put it on a schedule. (See CRON complaint below.) Thanks go to this fellow for pointing me in the right direction. The killer issue I ran into was that my external drive was giving me GPT errors when plugged into the FreeNAS box. Apparently my drive was formatted with MBR. I had to re-format with GPT using Windows Disk Management.

I couldn't get the CRON process working. It seems it's writing informational\debug messages to /dev/null? (Windows folks, /dev/null seems to be Linux's versions of a black hole.) So, there was no way for me to debug the issue.

ACPI seems to be broken in my version of FreeNAS. Apparently, this is a FreeNAS configuration issue that is fixed in a later version. I know, I know, why not upgrade to the latest version? Well, excuse me for living but it's not my job to be chasing the dream. All I want is something that works. Is that too much to ask?

These are just some FreeNAS complaints so let's talk about my real issues with a home NAS.

1. I have three(3) 1.5 TB drives running in ZFS raid and it's very depressing to see that all the digital stuff that I have gathered over my life span, worth keeping, takes up less than 5% of the available space. 
2. What is the value added? Wouldn't I get the same effect just dumping to an external usb drive. (If I were paranoid I could dump to two external usb drives.)
3. The cloud is coming. Do we really need to have a home NAS when we could just dump everything into the cloud? (No snarks about Amazon.)