backup to attached usb disks

[jeff hughes]

Help a new user. Would like to backup to a usb drive attached to freenas. The drive is shown on freenas under 'storage, view disks' as da2.
Hope this is not a stupid question.
Regards

 

[HoneyBadger]

Probably not a good idea. ZFS doesn't like drives that can suddenly disappear on it (such as USB) and the bridge chips in external drives often will mask SMART attributes and other things that ZFS is looking for.

If the drive goes to sleep to save power, for example, ZFS might decide to do a little health-check, see that the device didn't respond in time, promptly mark the device as missing and offline the entire pool.

I'd really advise against this, and say that the better option is more redundancy in your pool, and offsite backups via rsync to another server or copying to cloud hosting (I'm reading over Google's Nearline Cloud storage and liking it a LOT right now)

 

[Bidule0hm]

I think he ask how to do a one time copy and then removing the drive, not using it with ZFS.

You can use the command cp in the CLI but if you never used a CLI before it's not a good idea to jump right in. Learn how to use a CLI before ;)

 

[jeff hughes]

Hello BiduleOhm,
Yes, That is the idea. But cannot find any information on using cp. Apart from '

usage: cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-f | -i | -n] [-alpvx] source_file target_file
cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-f | -i | -n] [-alpvx] source_file ... target_dir
ectory'.

Thank you

 

[Bidule0hm]

You probably missed this part of my post "but if you never used a CLI before it's not a good idea to jump right in. Learn how to use a CLI before doing that ;)"

Now if you want to do it anyway (but then don't blame me if something goes wrong, you're the only one responsible of what you do in the CLI) the command is: cp -a the_directory_to_backup the_directory_where_to_put_the_backup but I think your drive isn't mounted so you need to use the command mount before to mount it and I won't describe how to use mount. Use your favorite search engine with something like tuto mount drive freebsd ;)

 

[CraftyClown]

Hi Jeff,

as a Freenas newbie myself and only just getting the hang of command line interfaces, I have recently had to use the cp (copy command) so here's an example of what I ran to copy data from one dataset set to another.

cp -R /mnt/TV/Media_1/* /mnt/TV/Media_2

Media_1 being the source and Media_2 being the destination. The -R after cp tells Freenas to treat this as a recursive operation ie; copy everything within the sub directories on the source drive, basically everything.

As BiduleOhm said, you will first need to mount the USB drive before this will work