Back up my raid?

Hello,

I’m a happy user of my Ex2, but I worry what would happen in case of fire or other catastrophe. I understand that each drive is not accessible through WIndows or MacOS.

I wonder if an simple approach would work: replace drive 2 with a new HD; let the RAID propogate everything to that drive, and then put the other drive offsite. I could regularly rotate them so there is always one drive offsite.

Is this how to do it? Are there other better approaches?

Thanks!

You can use the external USB connection on the back of the EX2 for backups. It’s described in the user manual.

In case of RAID Failure or a disaster, I could build a new raid and restore from that backup. But would’t my idea of putting a new drive in the RAID, and storing the drive 2 offsite, be a fuller, swappable backup, and therefore better?

Thanks!

Don’t know about swapping RAID drives to be better. Not familiar with that concept but swapping USB drives seems like the way to go. And, you don’t have to open the EX2 and monkey around with RAID on a regular basis. I don’t consider myself an expert on anything but the USB backups seem quicker, easier for off-site storage/swaps.

Hi Victor, thanks for writing back.
My thinking was that the swapped out drive would thus get a complete backup down to the byte, so that if a disaster occurred, like the thing melts in a fire, the offsite copy would be able to be the start of a new perfect RAID.

But I haven’t tried the USB backup approach. Can one start a new RAID from that, or is it merely files copied?

In any case, quick question: I don’t see anywhere in the docs how the backup disk should be formatted? Windows, OSX, Unix?

Thanks for your help,
Jack

You might find this a good read:

(Things you want to know about the EX2 but nobody had the answers... until now)