TS 109 and removable USB for mirroring

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aeon
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TS 109 and removable USB for mirroring

Post by aeon »

Hi, I am thinking of buying a TS 109 and fitting a 500 or 750 Gb disk. This is to provide file storage for a home / soho network with three Macs and three PCs.

I have been backing up to an external Maxtor OneTouchII 320Gb drive and I wonder if I might be able to attach this drive to the TS 109 for RAID style mirroring? Is it OK for it to be a different capacity? Also is it OK to only attach the Maxtor drive periodically to be updated with the latest changes so that most of the time the Maxtor is stored safely away from the network for security? Could I therefore swap to a higher capacity drive in the future? (or even alternate attached drives?)

Also - Not sure if I need the Pro version or not... I guess if I do not use Active Directory or NFS there is no harm in having it just in case? As I will always be likely to have PC / Mac and perhaps the odd Ubuntu Linux does this make it more or less useful?

A bunch of questions there jumbled up together, hope they have ready answers. Thanks.
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Epstein
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Post by Epstein »

In regards to the drive size the maximum size of the raid will always be the smallest disk, so there's not much point in having two of different size.
aeon
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Post by aeon »

So it is a 'normal' RAID 1? It sounded a bit as though it might be a disk mirror which somehow overcame such things.

Does this also mean that if running in this external RAID mode it must be not only a matched size drive but that once connected it should remain always in place?

Perhaps there is another way of setting a secondary USB connected drive to provide backups? I guess it could always be done using backup software running on one of the connected 'client' computers on the network to copy the required files from the Qnap to the USB drive?
ckamps
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Post by ckamps »

I have a similar question as to aeon's original post:

I'd like to have two external HDDs. One would be attached to the 109 and the other would be safely stored at some offsite location. I'd configure QRAID to mirror the content of the 109's internal HDD to the external HDD. Once a month, I'd unplug the attached HDD, bring it to the offsite location, grab the other HDD, bring it back home and plug it into the 109 as an external HDD.

1) Is it feasible to take this approach with the 109 and QRAID?

2) Would I have to reset the QRAID config every time I swapped external HDDs?

If using QRAID would not be feasible in this scenario, is there a backup function on the 109 that would enable me to copy all of the data from the 109's internal HDD to an attached external HDD?

I don't want to depend on a PC to orchestrate any of the backups from the 109 to an external HDD attached to the 109 or to a PC.
osamede
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Post by osamede »

ckamps wrote: is there a backup function on the 109 that would enable me to copy all of the data from the 109's internal HDD to an attached external HDD?
I don't want to depend on a PC to orchestrate any of the backups from the 109 to an external HDD attached to the 109 or to a PC.
Any answer on this?
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Lars
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Post by Lars »

osamede -
I guess the Qraid will do it for you nicely, haven't tested this myself but would be interesting to know if it really works and will keep the nas online if/when the internal drive fails.
"Qraid formatting" is availble both for usb and eSata ports in addition to "data sharing" format of the drives.
Other backup options are configuration (manually to a file) or setup remote replication of network shares < guess this works with any rsync server?

There's no remote mirroring (yet) or snapshot settings as I have in my Zyxel NSA-2400.

Ellers funker denne lille tassen bra! :P
Last edited by Lars on Sun Dec 02, 2007 7:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
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osamede
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Post by osamede »

Tusen takk!
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