I currently have a PR4100 with all drive bays populated in the following configuration:
2GB [Vol 1, RAID 0]
2GB [Vol 1, RAID 0]
4GB [Vol 2, RAID 0]
4GB [Vol 2, RAID 0]
I’m running very low on space on the first volume, and I’d like to replace the two 2GB drives with larger ones. I know how to back up the data in my shares, but I’m not sure how to back up the system and app config, such as the Plex configuration and metadata.
Looking at the drive contents over SSH I can see all my standard shares in /shares/{share-name}, which correspond to either /mnt/HD/HD_a2/{share-name} or /mnt/HD/HD_b2/{share-name}, depending on the volume on which they exist…
But I also see /mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog, which appears to contain the config etc. for all the installed apps.
Can anyone confirm that backing up the data in my shares, AND the data from Nas_prog along with the backup.config file downloaded from the MyCloud web app should be all i need to rebuild the system perfectly once the drives are replaced?
All important app data is located in Nas_Prog. It is sufficient to backup those dirs.
You were using RAID0 stripe mode so you will lose all data on /mnt/HD/HD_a2 … including that 37G Plex share.
1 disk failure in RAID0 means you lose all data from the array… I suggest you use a JBOD volume for your new disks, so you keep max capacity but ony risk losing the data of a single failing disk. Also it is much easier to make backups. You can’t use hotswap in RAID0…
Thanks @Tfl - I already have the Plex share backed up elsewhere so I’m expecting that to go, but assuming i also backup and restore the Nas_Prog directory and the config file from the MyCloud control panel to the newly installed drives, (along with all the backed-up shares) everything should by as it was with the original drives?
Exactly what @Tfl said (I feel like I need to get that printed on a t-shirt…); as you’ve seen, the stray application will deposit data elsewhere on the disk, however, this normally amounts to a temp or cache folder. Nas_Prog will contain most of what you’ll need to get back up and running. As mentioned, you will need to reinstall some applications to get OS3 to recognize them as being there in the first place, and since shares are symbolic links, it is likely that those will need to be re-created as well.
As far as RAID, RAID1 will mirror both disks and should give you increased read speeds (before I had offsite backups, everything I had was stored on RAID1 or RAID5 so I could stand to lose a disk and not lose data). I prefer to use JBOD now (literally standing for “Just a Bunch Of Disks”) for the ease of use and with advancements in SMART (geeks love acronyms!), your system will likely know something is wrong with a drive well before it becomes unreadable.
