FreeNAS
FreeNAS as the name suggests is a free and open source network attached storage software.
Your personal data is highly valuable and strictly confidential. Everyone wants a secure software to store their life stories. Alternative network storage solutions like QNAP and Synology might be easier to setup, however the cost attached to them, along with limited flexibility, isn’t the same story as FreeNAS.
FreeNAS uses the ZFS file system to store, manage, and protect data. It provides advanced features like snapshots to keep old versions of files and incremental remote backups. This keeps your data safe on another device without having to wait for huge file transfers, and intelligent compression, additionally FreeNAS reduces the size of files so quickly and efficiently that it actually helps transfers to happen faster.
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How Does FreeNAS Works?
FreeNAS was introduced in 2005 and has since been downloaded over nine million times! It’s name derives from the base operating system it’s powered by (FreeBSD), the current stable version, which is FreeNAS 11, is fully featured and free.
Both people in a home or corporate environment setting can benefit from its use.
FreeNAS uses the ZFS file system which has some interesting features that, even in the event that your motherboard dies, or the system get corrupted, or some other sort of hardware problem, will still give you the choice to plug in your drives to another machine running FreeNAS and import your volumes.
There are ZFS options for creating striped drives, mirrored drives and even a disk array with two parity drives. This means your data is protected in three layers and your array will have to suffer three drives failing outright before you have a catastrophic failure.
With FreeNAS you don’t need to pay for cloud storage subscriptions ever again and suffer the risk of losing your data to malevolent monsters out there. Your data will be stored only on your FreeNAS box and any device you, and only you give access to, thus diminishing the chances of data leakage.
FreeNAS And Firewalls
FreeNAS is based on the highly secure FreeBSD operating system and follows security best practices in development.
Having said so, although FreeNAS is a secure data storage software and ensures data protection, still it is not designed as a security software and it depends on being protected from hostile traffic by a properly configured firewall.
FreeNAS supports 256-bit encryption to prevent drives from being read if they’re physically removed from the system, but it cannot do much while the data is being read or is in transit over the network.
Like all software, FreeNAS depends on good security practices to keep data safe. Furthermore, FreeNAS supports a number of third party plug-ins to sync with a variety of devices without exposing your data over the internet.
Other Fun Uses of FreeNAS
Despite FreeNAS is mostly seen as a storage server you can also use it as a media server after adding a few plug-ins.
Apart from this, you can set up your very own and personal cloud on FreeNAS that only you and authorized users have access to.
It’s like having your personal Dropbox.
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