Backup to USB WD easystore

[goldcoin93]

I managed to get an 18TB HDD WD easystore from BestBuy for $199. My current TrueNAS Scale (ruunning as a Proxmox VM) setup is new and not being backed up at the moment.

I have a 3 HDD pool of 4TB for 7TB useable. In TrueNAS, I also run all the Arrs as well as Plex.

Although I know backing up to 1 drive is usually NOT recommended, I was wondering if I decide to go this route, what would be the best approach? My main goal is to backup the plex media datasets (NFS). Here is my take at this:

- Create pool with new HDD (stripe)
- Create a replication task and run it.

Also, as far as I am concerned, I need to unmount the pool if I were to unplug the USB easystore drive, correct?

Or should I just create another VM

 

[HoneyBadger]

Also, as far as I am concerned, I need to unmount the pool if I were to unplug the USB easystore drive, correct?

Hello @goldcoin93

You're correct in that you will need to unmount (export) the pool before unplugging the USB device. Failing to do so may result in the pool becoming unmountable without recovery efforts, or unmountable entirely (as it's a stripe device with no redundancy.)

As TrueNAS SCALE is running as a Proxmox VM, there's also the potential complication point of the hardware passthrough - both for your USB HDD as well as your current 3x4T HDDs. Are you using PCIe passthrough of the storage controller (recommended) or assigning raw disks in Proxmox (not recommended)?

 

[goldcoin93]

Hello @goldcoin93

You're correct in that you will need to unmount (export) the pool before unplugging the USB device. Failing to do so may result in the pool becoming unmountable without recovery efforts, or unmountable entirely (as it's a stripe device with no redundancy.)

As TrueNAS SCALE is running as a Proxmox VM, there's also the potential complication point of the hardware passthrough - both for your USB HDD as well as your current 3x4T HDDs. Are you using PCIe passthrough of the storage controller (recommended) or assigning raw disks in Proxmox (not recommended)?

Thank you very much. I am not using PCIe passthrough. I am passing them through as raw disks in Proxmox both the 3x4TB HDDs and the USB drive using the following:

Code:

qm set 100 -scsi2 /dev/disk/by-id/

Passthrough Physical Disk to Virtual Machine (VM) - Proxmox VE

pve.proxmox.com

I am fairly new to TrueNAS Scale so after reading a lot of posts, I decided to go this route especially because I had budget limitations and hardware limitations.

 

[Davvo]

If you want some form of protection against sector damage, you can increase the copies of the dataset to 2; doing so will however halve your usable space since every data is written two times.

 

[Arwen]

Thank you very much. I am not using PCIe passthrough. I am passing them through as raw disks in Proxmox both the 3x4TB HDDs and the USB drive using the following:

Code:

qm set 100 -scsi2 /dev/disk/by-id/

Passthrough Physical Disk to Virtual Machine (VM) - Proxmox VE

pve.proxmox.com

I am fairly new to TrueNAS Scale so after reading a lot of posts, I decided to go this route especially because I had budget limitations and hardware limitations.

Part of the issue of passing through raw disks and not the PCIe disk controller, is that ZFS no longer has direct access to the drives. This is a requirement for ZFS' data protection.

That said, you might run for years without problems. But, whence you do have problems, it may be more than some simple fix. People loose data pools with configurations like that. Probably due to out of order writes. Warning over.


I use single disk ZFS pools for backups all the time. I try and use eSATA but USB does work. Don't forget to run a ZFS scrub every now and then. I tend to run one just before my backups, because I have a 3 month rotation.

Their is one caveat to USB attached ZFS pools. Don't leave them attached. Export the pool, detach the USB cable and power down the drive. This helps reset what tends to be cheap about them, the USB to SATA controller chip.

Here is something I write on how I do backups:

How to: Backup to local disks

How to: Backups to local disks Overview: This subject comes up often enough that I thought I would start a post of how I do it. Specifically I back up my TrueNAS to a hot-inserted, locally attached disk, then when done, hot-remove and take...

www.truenas.com

 

[goldcoin93]

Part of the issue of passing through raw disks and not the PCIe disk controller, is that ZFS no longer has direct access to the drives. This is a requirement for ZFS' data protection.

That said, you might run for years without problems. But, whence you do have problems, it may be more than some simple fix. People loose data pools with configurations like that. Probably due to out of order writes. Warning over.


I use single disk ZFS pools for backups all the time. I try and use eSATA but USB does work. Don't forget to run a ZFS scrub every now and then. I tend to run one just before my backups, because I have a 3 month rotation.

Their is one caveat to USB attached ZFS pools. Don't leave them attached. Export the pool, detach the USB cable and power down the drive. This helps reset what tends to be cheap about them, the USB to SATA controller chip.

Here is something I write on how I do backups:

How to: Backup to local disks

How to: Backups to local disks Overview: This subject comes up often enough that I thought I would start a post of how I do it. Specifically I back up my TrueNAS to a hot-inserted, locally attached disk, then when done, hot-remove and take...

www.truenas.com

Thank you very much for your throughout explanation and for providing the guide you wrote.