I would like to have a drive that I can back up some data to. Currently I have an external drive that I use for this. I am moving to TrueNAS this weekend once the parts for my NAS come in.
Should I remove the drive from the enclosure and use SATA or does TrueNAS handle USB drives well enough?
USB connections are not reliable for permanent pool members, but for external backup to a single drive it works well enough.
@Arwen uses USB for backup and has described the process in detail: Look for her post on the old forum.
Can you add it without adding it to a pool? Or you mean don’t add it with other SATA drives in a pool?
You actually make a pool out of the single drive and replicate to it.
Thanks!
Do you have any good tips on backing up?
Basically, I’ll have about 5 shares, I want to back up. Incremental would best keeping the last several copies. Is there any way the backup files would be available outside of Truenas? I am thinking, if the OS takes a poopie I would lose the data and the backups.
Replication to another TrueNAS system.
Replication to an external drive—which is then removed and safely stored elsewhere.
To a non-ZFS system, use rsync.
Thanks!
When you say “external drive”, is it the kind that requires its own power (1 data cable, 1 power cable), or the “portable” kind that only has a single USB cable?
It has it’s own power.
Those are better.
They hold 3.5" HDDs (sometimes Western Digital “white labels”, which are great drives on their own), and are less likely to be SMR, especially at higher capacities of 8-TiB+.
I guess I am going to have to just plug it in and figure it out. Not like I have never been giving a device from a user and told “make this work on our network” before HAHA
This might not have been addressed: Does the external drive currently hold data?
It does currently yes. I plan on plugging it into my computer and copying the data over, after the NAS is setup and share are created, before I do anything. It backs up all the data on my NAS right now.
