Seeking advice on setup.

[ethereal]

Thank you for taking the time to read my thread. I will give you a little background and hopefully I shall receive some sage advice.

I have used freenas for about 3 years primarily as a media server for television programmes and films. I also used it to backup photographs and home videos.

I had a windows box which i used for editing my photographs and videos. I stored personal documents and computer programs here.

So the windows box had the original photos and videos and i backed them up to the freenas and an external hdd. i thought as i was using ntfs and non ecc memory i may have problems in the future with corruption of my data. so recently i moved my hdd from the windows box to my freenas box. i thought i should keep the new hdd separate. i thought i should keep them separate as this will allow me more hdd fails and i am also backing up the originals and if everything is on one pool i would loose my originals and backups.

1. i did have a zpool (6 x 3 TB Raid-Z2) called freenas.

2. now i have another zpool (4 x 1 TB-Raid-Z1) called working.

the originals are on working and i back these up to freenas


I know that almost all my originals and backups are in the same case is this a problem ?

i thought if all the hdd were together using zfs and ecc memory this would be the best plan

I have a backup on an external hdd and some bluray discs

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

The only way to answer this is for you to assess your own risk tolerance given certain scenarios and how likely you think they are vs how much you care about the data. Clearly, having your backups in the same case as your live data is more risky than physically separating them for some risks, e.g. the box gets stolen or catches fire. But it's better than having only one copy of the data.

 

[Bhoot]

Natively I would see a few problems to what you are saying. you currently have 2 pools and you can't add more disks to an already existing pool. To combine them into 1 you will need to format the disks and recreate the pool. Moreover since you have 6x3tb disks adding the 4tb as part of the pool will give a max space of 3tb. Now as the person who replied said.. its all risk vs cost. I would leave nothing important without a backup/way to recover unless its something you didn't care about. Just saying..

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

you can't add more disks to an already existing pool

This is not correct, but there are limitations and pitfalls when attempting to modify pool layout, so it's best to read and understand this guide before developing a plan.

To combine them into 1 you will need to format the disks and recreate the pool

This is true.