Sync RAID arrays to external USB HDD?

[Chris Stinson]

Hi guys,

I have just bought a 2nd hand HP micro server, and I wanted to set it up as a NAS.
I currently have 2x 2TB disks to put in it and intend to put 2x 4TB disks in at some point later.
Both of these would be RAIS-1 arrays.

I would like to back up the contents of both arrays to a single external disk that I will keep "off site".
But I dont want to wait to copy all the contents over each time.
Is there a function in FreeNAS to synchronise in this way? I dont mind if its some CLI command I need to run.

Thanks in advance.

 

[danb35]

Lots of ways to do this, but the devil's in the details. If you want it to run automatically on a schedule, you'd need to make sure that the external disk is available at that time. It would also depend on the filesystem you want to use on the external disk. If you want it to be anything other than ZFS, rsync is probably your best bet. If you're going to format it as ZFS, then ZFS replication would be the obvious choice.

 

[Ericloewe]

Using something that exposes itself as a disk, the only supported solution would be local replication (or rsync, but that's of dubious value when the destination is ZFS - and the destination is necessarily ZFS in this case).

 

[Chris Stinson]

Thanks for the input guys.
The disk wont be available all the time. I will only connect it as and when I want to update the offsite storage.
I have no preference on the Filesystem for the external drive. So I'm happy to use something other than ZFS.
So it seems like rsync is what I need to look into.

Thanks again!

 

[Ericloewe]

So I'm happy to use something other than ZFS.

But FreeNAS isn't.