Redundancy help

[Ryan Peterson]

So I'm contemplating a freenas server for my home, but I am stuck on raid vs external backups. I'm thinking that having a usb external drive for every drive in the system would be the safest way to go; am I correct? I like RAID, but if the PSU explodes or something, I don't want to lose my data. But, how can I create a system in which the systems accessing the freenas server see only one drive, while there are several separate drives in the system that are all backed up to external USB drives?

 

[Durkatlon]

That's not really how it works. If you want an extra backup of your NAS, just use a single big external drive and write the backups there. I suppose it is possible to use "dd" or something to back up individual drives in the RAID array, but there's really no point. You won't be able to get any files off of that backup, because every file is written across all the constituent disks of the array.