NASLite Network Attached Storage

Right now I am running NASLite-2 HDD on a 500 Gb HDD with a single partition. Works great. Is it possible to partition the drive to use 4 partitions. The reason I want do this is so if I have a software data corruption issue I don't lose all the data on the drive. I would only need to reformat that one partition. Thus the rest the of the drive would survive. Remember, even RAID does not protect against software file corruption!

Thanks

Bernie Parker

You can' add additional partitions. What your describing is not a good practice anyhow, what happens if the entire drive dies?

NASLite2 uses ext3 as it's filesystem, as far as file corruption the only thing you really have to worry about is the power going off, a UPS connected to the naslite system would be time better spent.

But a UPS only helps while it's battery still has power. If the power is off for a lengthy period of time NASLite is going to eventually crash anyway.

True, the hard drive is eventually gonna die too, so i guess none of this matters

I don't disagree with you, but I don't think the average NAS Lite user is a running a full blown managed server setup with multiple RAID 5's with terrabytes of data in a server room. Remember I am concerned with SOFTWARE not hardware data corruption. Even RAID 5 is not immune from software file corruption or viruses when not properly set up. The specific issue I am referring to happened to me before. I had a large video file I was editing. There were many videos on that drive. When in the video editing program I was using, the editing program itself crashed taking all my video files with it. While there are no guarantees of course, had those files been spread across multiple partitions there was a chance I could at least recover some of the them. Remember the drive itself was not damaged or defective, it just had software corruption due to a program crash and even RAID 5 will not protect against that. GIGO!

Bernie

To completely eliminate the likelihood of what you are describing, all you have to do is set 2 drives in a mirror using naslite's daily mirror. That way you work on one drive and keep a copy of that drive on the mirror drive. So when your software thrashes the files you have a complete backup in the mirror.

Partitions will not help you here. I had a drive develop bad blocks in the low cylinders where the partition table resides. Took all the files with it because of a bad partition table.

Get 2 identical drives and mirror them. That is the best way to keep a easily accessible backup of the files.