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I have 4 4TB external USB drives in a raid 0 set (created with btrfs). I have another 4 4TB external USB drives not in a raid set.
What would be the best solution to backup the raid set to the 4 individual drives?
Rorschach1960
Posted 2019-03-01T14:40:27.517
Reputation: 1
1What kind of backup do you have on your mind? Regular, incremental backup? One-time backup? Should it be browsable? – gronostaj – 2019-03-01T14:42:56.823
The raid array contains my media for my Plex server. I would like a browsable backup made when new media is added. Possibly more of a "sync" situation? Problem with sync would be the possibility of losing data from the backup if it is accidentally deleted from raid. – Rorschach1960 – 2019-03-01T14:46:49.660
Do you need support for Btrfs's snapshots and other advanced features, or do you just want a plain copy of these files? How do you expect to use that copy? – gronostaj – 2019-03-01T14:49:41.403
I think, just a plain copy of the files would be fine. They would only be used if the array goes down. – Rorschach1960 – 2019-03-01T14:52:52.503
The only solution I am coming up with is to create directories, on the raid, that contain apx. 4TB and copy/sync/backup each to an individual drive. Once the directories are filled to the 4TB allowance, I would the make them read-only. – Rorschach1960 – 2019-03-01T15:00:59.547
You could treat all drives as a single continuous drive (called a "spanned volume") and just periodically sync both volumes. But it would probably be smarter to just add these drives to the RAID array to operate in RAID 1+0 and let Btrfs do its job instead of reinventing the wheel. – gronostaj – 2019-03-01T21:28:59.243
I'm not sure I can add the raid 1 to the raid 0 without rebuilding the entire array. I do like the idea of a separate JBOD array or "Spanned Volume". I'm going to try that solution. Thanks! – Rorschach1960 – 2019-03-01T22:47:45.177