Switching between 3 HDDs on My Book Duo for off site backup

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hi guys

I am a photographer and looking at getting the My Book Duo for backing up thousands of image files on a weekly basis.

The plan is:

  • import the images from the camera onto the MacBook

  • immediately backup these images onto the My Book set to RAID 1 (Drive A mirrored on drive B).

  • I’d then like to replace Drive B with a Drive C to have a third copy, which then gets taken offsite.

So Drive B and C are interchangable and are updated with whatever content is on Drive A.

Are there any issues with this setup? or does anyone have a better suggestion?

Thanks in advance!

2

Welcome to the Community.

What you are trying to do is not recommended since it will likely degrade the RAID array. “Mirror” does not work by first copying the data into drive A and then copying it again into drive B, but rather copying the data into drive A and B _ at once _, and mirroring back from either A to B or B to A in case of a drive failure requires for drive C to be empty.

I’d recommend a completely separate hard drive working in tandem with your My Book Duo.

Regards,

Trancer.

1 Like
3

Thanks Trancer. Glad I checked that first.

If I keep the My Book Duo in RAID 0, could I then connect the second drive via the additional USB port in a daisy-chain to the additional backup?

4

You can connect other USB devices to the USB hub ports in the unit regardless of RAID configuration as they will mount independently from the unit (It will not “fuse” all available storage). However, you will need to either manually copy/paste the files from the WD My Book Duo to the other USB drive or use a third party automatic backup/synchronization utility to handle the process since WD SmartWare is currently a Windows-only application.