Long story short, I wiped a drive I shouldn’t have and lost some data. Now I’m thinking of setting up a ‘cold storage’ array of sorts with the stack of spare 3.5" drives I have laying around. I’m thinking once a year backup

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Is there an easy-ish way to backup a set of data that is spread across multiple drives without them all being mounted at once?

  • diamondsw@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    That’s essentially what I do. Bunch of drives, each formatted individually, then pooled with MergerFS. Get a new drive, add to the pool. If a drive fails, it only loses that much of my backup; rest of the disks are unaffected. All the advantages of storage pooling without the redundancy (which here is useful).

  • webbkorey@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    My cold storage is another Truenas box that powers itself up once a month, pulls an rsync and shuts down 2 hrs after that completes. Not quite what you asked for, but I don’t have to think about it. The drives in that server are the smaller drives (2-4tb) that have been in the main Truenas box and been retired from that duty.

    • pencloud@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I have a MD3200 coupled to a R510 that I plan to do exactly this with. i have 12 4TB drives in the MD3200 and 12 2TB drives in the R510. Monthly zfs pull is my aim. Once I work out how to use the MD3200 that is!