What's the best way to backup RaidZ1 to external USB drives?

[breinholm]

My Setup:

NAS4Free 9.1.0.1 (531)

MB: Asrock AD2700-ITX
Main disks: 2 x WD 3T in RaidZ1 attached to SATA connectors on MB
Backup disk: External disk connected via USB 3.0, ZFS - Stribe formatted.

Backup scheme used: A Rsync-local job starts every night and transfers new data to the attached External USB 3.0 disk. This disk is once a week swapped with another External USB 3.0 disk.

Problem: Its very time consuming to manually remove all traces of the old USB 3.0 disk, and then add the data for the new USB disk, when the disks are swapped.

Can any of you recommend better ways for doing this?

Thanks / Peter

[raulfg3]

Main disks: 2 x WD 3T in RaidZ1

not sure, but or you have 3 disk in raidZ1 or you have 2 Disk in ZFS Mirror.

Backup scheme used: A Rsync-local job starts every night and transfers new data to the attached External USB 3.0 disk. This disk is once a week swapped with another External USB 3.0 disk.

I use other aproach to do my backup, not sure if is what you want.

I do not use rsync and none automated backup.

I use FreeFileSync to create jobs, that I launch manually to a USB3 Disk on my Win7 PC. <- None problems about drivers or name trace. I use SMB to transfer from NAS to PC

[ku-gew]

What about splitting the pool opportunely in datasets and then use zfs send/receive? Since it's a block copy and not file copy, it should be faster. You may try also this script:
https://github.com/jollyjinx/ZFS-TimeMachine

[breinholm]

Thanks for your replies,

I have only the two WD 3T SATA drives in my RaidZ1 stripe.
The USB disks are ZFS formatted and put in their own virtual stripe pools - one for each.
Only one USB drive is attached at the time.

The essential problem is all the configuration that's needed when I swap the USB disks used for backup.

To make it work I have to:

1) Delete all ZFS configurations for present disk
2) Detach the disk and attach the other USB disk
3) Clear config and import disks
4) re-program the disk standby times and APM for all the attached disks (Has to be re-entered after clear /import)
5) Enter ZFS configuration data for the new USB disk

Not to forget a couple of resets that's needed along the process..

I hope that there is a simpler solution to all the re-configuration, but it seems that swapping USB-disks is complicated with FreeBSD

[Tomsk]

I'll jump in here despite a lack of knowledge about RSYNC et al.

1) wouldn't it be easier to re-write your RSYNC job each time to swap disks?

2) Have the RSYNC job backup to 'both' USB drives and ignore the errors when one of the drives is missing?
I do this in Windows using robocopy to back up to my USB drives. One drive is a desktop device and is permanently attached. The other drive is a portable that is attached occasionally. The script is programmed to run at night.

[breinholm]

I just found that its only the initial display of the attached disks that is wrong.

Here I have added the WD at USB0 port and a Seagate at USB1 - Kingston is the boot memory stick:

WD at USB0- Seagate at USB1.PNG

Here I only have the Seagate attached to USB0 port - see how the reported sizes and descriptions are wrong:

Seagate at USB0.jpg

But here is what ZFS info reports - Everything is OK:

ZFS_info.jpg

All R/W's to the attached disk are OK. Attaching the WD disk gives the same results.

Now I have to re-boot the server after the disk-swap . Disable the Rsync job for the disk that's removed and enable the job for the new - that's it.

I hope the initial disk reporting will be fixed in a later release.

Thanks for your help / Peter

[bcs-luggi]

Hey,

looking here you'll find me with the same problem.
And looking here you'll find my solution.
Bert