OK, I setup all the USB backups. Now I want to do internal backups from one drive to the other. However, the destination browse button just looks at drive 1 and tells me I can’t back up to the same location. So, I making a mistake in 1) not setting up something on drive 2 or 2) I am misunderstanding what an internal backup is and drive 1 automatically copies itself to drive 2 as that is the whole point of a mirror. I am suspecting it is #2. Can someone confirm?
Thanks.
Update: Maybe the section on RAID should have been in the user manual before the backups section. I am running the default of RAID 1, so my data is duplicated on both drives without me needing to do anything. Makes sense.
I think you’ve answered your own question, but yes #2 is correct.
As you already surmised, RAID 1 automatically mirrors the content of drive 1 onto drive 2, so you have internal duplication without any requirement for intervention from the user. It’s also why a “4TB” device will only show up with 2TB of capacity, as you’re writing everything twice, once to each drive.
If you set your discs up in JBOD mode for example (as my box is set up as) then it treats the drives individually and separately, at which point I have the option to do internal back-ups from drive 1 to drive 2 or vice-versa as drive 2 is now accessible independently of drive 1. It means I have twice the capacity available, at the expense of not having the internal mirroring if one of the drives fails (which is fine in my case, as I use the MCM as a backup destination on drive 1 and also as a media server on drive 2, but I also have second copies of each either on the local machines that I’m backing up from or on a separate drive USB-connected to the MCM).
