NASLite Network Attached Storage

After searching the forums, different parts of my question have been answered but, not as a whole.

What I'm ultimately after is an emergency, portable drive. I'm running 2 RAID 1 arrays (see signature) internal in a large heavy tower. After several tornadoes in the St.Louis area in the last couple of weeks, I would like to add a 1TB USB drive to mirror both arrays through partitioning, if possible, that could be carried away in a disaster situation to preserve my data. Is this a possible solution? I used to use drive trays until they started to fail so, I have since moved my hardware arrays to a permanent mounting in the tower. I suppose that I would need the two partitions on the USB drive to be seen as two separate drives. Otherwise, I would need two external USB drives to mirror each array which would be ok but, a singe drive would be better. So, is an emergency portable drive possible?

If it were me in you situation I would just simply do a backup using one of the many software solutions out there at regular intervals. You can setup NL to do it but not sure about multiple arrays. As a side note, NL does NOT support software RAID of any type at this time. It will Rsync though and that would be one path you might want to explore further.

Mike

My misunderstanding. Thanks.

Hi,

I have my business data on a NL server with NL doing Mirrors on the internal drives at noon and at 8PM but I also have a small USB drive (on another computer on the local LAN) and I'm doing copies of the server data on this external drive twice a day too. In case of a problem (no hurricanes here in France but fire is always a possibility), I can unplug the USB drive and go away with it. The worst case scenario would be loosing 1/2 day of work which is acceptable for me.

In your case, you do not need to connect the drive to the NL server. You can do it if you program NL to mirror on it (but you'd need 2 drives). If you plan to use a backup (or copy) software it would be faster if the USB drive was on the computer running the backup/copy program.

The most important point is that you need to backup often (depends on the data change frequency) and regularly and not just in case of an approaching problem. It takes some time to copy big amounts of data and it always fails when you are in a hurry (Murphy's laws ) ...

Regards