Upgrading drives, need some advice please

[cs7404]

I have an existing single HDD in my EX2 that is already setup with shares on it.

I am replacing it with 2 new HDD’s and want to extract the data from the existing drive and put it on the new arrangement. don’t think I can do that using the EX2 alone because I am setting up the new drives in Spanning arrangement so both bays will be full with new/blank drives.

i believe the current drive in the NAS was formatted ext3 or ext4 filesystem (?) i want to install this drive in a USB enclosure, connect it via USB to the NAS, and transfer back to the NAS shares (manually) the files on it. maybe Rsync could be used ?

Concern is I do not know if the NAS will recognize the old drive formatted as ext3 (or ext4) when connected via USB. Also am not sure if I would be able to navigate thru the old drive to get to the folders with my files.

And I don’t have another HDD handy that I can use to perform a backup of the entire NAS. The USB backup drive I was using has basically failed (WD My Book).

have about 5TB of data that I need to migrate.

Any advice or steps to do this successfully I would really appreciate it.

[cs7404]

if using the NAS’s built-in USB Backup app would be the fastest way to do this, I can try it this way:

1- a new single-drive inside the USB enclosure as the backup unit (what file formats does the NAS support for externally connected drives ? I would want to choose the most reliable and compatible file system, if anyone has recommendations more than welcome).

2- plug into the current NAS arrangement, and then just setup the USB Backup job and wait for it to finish.

3- do the drive swap on the NAS and setup the volume from the dashboard.

4- ssh into the NAS and manually copy the content from the USB backup back to the NAS.

I am wondering if (after the drive swap) I can use the Recover option in USB Backup app ?

Any advice from anyone who’s had experience with doing these or alternate ways to do the same thing, I would greatly appreciate your comments. just looking to avoid some pitfalls.

thanks in advance

[cs7404]

i found info in the manual regarding supported formats for external USB, so that answers 1/2 of the question.

For these formats below, which one is most reliable to use on the backup drive ?

FAT/FAT32
NTFS
HFS+J
Linux Ext2, Ext3/Ext4

in addition to reliability/resiliency of the file system, i have some concerns about how well USB interfaces and the cards that are used to connect to the HDD’s are reliable enough. it may be likely that the board on the My Book failed and caused corruption on the HDD in it. The My Book was nearly full when I started having issues with it. the flimsy connector on the back of the My Book that is popular with portable externals of higher capacities could also be a problem.

It looks like a USB B-type connection is more robust, but given I am considering the drive swap now, maybe I should go with a 4-bay NAS and configure all my drives in the one NAS enclosure ? more reliable than USB ?

[Cordorb]

If your NAS has more than one USB port you can set up two backup tasks for backups to 2 different .
drives.

I only use a mirror raid setup so like to format the raid disk with a format one of my computers can still read if the NAS unit fails ( and a few of my WD BAS have - and were end of line )

off line reading can sometimes be a problem if you use encryption.

[cs7404]

the approach i chose to use is to have 2 physically separate USB drives (independent enclosures). i have 2 USB ports on the NAS. each port will connect to a USB drive.

In the app, I setup 2 jobs that are identical except for the destination. Each job backs up all of my shares:

job 1: NAS shares → USB 1 (NTFS) brand X drive
job 2: NAS shares → USB 2 (HFS+ J) brand Y drive

Running both backup jobs will give me redundancy.

a single external enclosure would have been nice and RAID 1 would also have been an option, but don’t believe I would get better reliability for data protection with those vs. the option I chose.

these drives are all in the same physical location, so that is 1 point of failure … but practically I think it will be fine.

I would like to recognize NAS_User for pointing out the differences between CMR and SMR drives.

Recommended drive options to add for JBOD?

running out of space and want to add a new drive into the empty bay i have. other than WD Red, what other classes and Brands would work ok with the EX2 Ultra ? Currently the NAS has a single 8TB WD Red. or if it’s easier to answer this way, what classes of HDD should I avoid ? thanks in advance for the advice

[NAS_user]

I preach the “separate location” philosophy because I once had a house flooded out.

Fortunately, I had some time for physical preparation - - so no data was lost and my family was basically fine. There was, however, some damage to the property (North of $150K)

Also, I have had some “weird” things happen to me while travelling - - (more than one event that could be described as a “natural disaster”); such that I am very happy I backup all data before leaving home.

[cs7404]

hope it was just $ lost and not more than that in your situations …

while in the process of doing this whole swap, and looking at how awfully long it is taking to create the first backup onto a fresh drive, just so I can have 1 copy of my data somewhere as I do the drive swapping … i decided to kill the backup job that was running and start over again a different way.

looking at those individual enclosures i bought, they aren’t vented and no fans either. simple aluminum boxes with a sata/usb interface. given the new drive was getting pretty warm during the backup job, i thought it’s better to switch to housing my backup disks in an enclosure with a fan. so now, i am back to an arrangement where the 2 individual backup disks are housed in a single enclosure that’s vented and fanned. i have options to choose the volume style but want to stick with independent (JBOD).

so what i have basically, is a single usb out from the NAS to the enclosure, which will have 2 disks in JBOD mode. right now there is just one disk in it because i need to get everything off the WD Red that’s in the NAS before I can pull it.

In lieu of creating another backup job and grinding my teeth for 3 days waiting for it to transfer 5TB of data, i am instead ssh’d into the NAS and copying the shares from the NAS to the USB drive manually using cp -r to copy directories + sub-directories + files. This seems to be moving along faster than using the app.

this is better I believe for control of when things are copied over, so that I can leave the really large share (Shared Videos) to start in the evening and come back to it the next day.

after doing all of that, i will do the drive swap in the NAS. Seeing that I’m to have redundancy (2 duplicates of original) when I am all configured … I think I’m confident enough to go RAID0 on the NAS (2x 6TB N300’s = 12TB), in order to gain some speed and performance. I already have more confidence in knowing all my disks are now CMR’s and the solid reputation of the N300’s is enough for me for now.

so be it that one of the backup disks will be the old WD Red I have (to save a few hundred $), eventually I will scale up to more N300’s if they prove reliable.

the fact that my WD Blue (which is likely CMR) kicked the bucket even at 5 years of age is not inspiring confidence in the brand. it could have just as well been my only drive and i would have been completely hosed in addition to $$ displaced and inconvenienced at the same time.

certainly a learning lesson for me.

[NAS_user]

Yes, I am personally very fortunate. . . . .and the impacts were “mere” money, a bunch of stories, and a whole pile of inconvenience. Being solidly upper middle class with cash reserve does have advantages. . .

• • I personally am a fan of Raid 1. “Should be” relatively easy to recover drives if the enclosure poops out.

Raid0 doubles your probability of a drive failure. . .which will toast all the data on both drives. But if you have a backup. . .then good.

If starting fresh . . . .I honestly might simply opt for JBOD - - - and rely a bit more on data backups for protection. (I do have an enclosure with OS/5 loaded. . . as a test bed. . … at somepoint, I am likely to revert the OS back to OS/3 and will trash the data I put on that drive . . that would be a good opportunity to go JBOD)

[cs7404]

for the backup enclosure, i cannot (at this time) do RAID1. even though both drives are 8TB, they are different in that the N300 spins 7200 while the Red spins 5400. it’s more convenient because it’s absolutely automatic in the background.

right now i’ll just rely on 2 USB backup jobs that are identical except for the destination folders. so long as i have one duplicate of my NAS on each physical drive, i am in a much better place than where i was previously. have already used this one drive failure as a point in time to displace some $ 500 in order to build something this simple, not willing to spend more than that right now even though something more ideal would be a 5+ bay NAS as well as an external backup to achieve 3 duplicates of my data.

thanks again for the advice NAS_user, and thanks for keeping me company in this lonely forum.