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The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => D-Link Storage => DNS-320 => Topic started by: t121anf on July 20, 2011, 11:22:22 AM

Title: Mirror Drive 1 to Drive 2 without Raid
Post by: t121anf on July 20, 2011, 11:22:22 AM
is it possible to keep an identical copy of drive 1 on drive 2 without using raid?

i'm wary of raid as if it fails i here its a nightmare to recover.

ideally i want a solution that doesn't require me manually copying everything
Title: Re: Mirror Drive 1 to Drive 2 without Raid
Post by: ivan on July 20, 2011, 01:21:02 PM
What problem do you have with RAID?

RAID1 has the disks mirrored such that if one fails you can remove it, insert a new drive and it will copy everything to the new drive so that they are the same again - at least mine did when I conducted a test.

If on the other hand you use RAID0 then everything is spread across both drives which does cause problems should one drive fail.

To give yourself a bit of knowledge on RAID read the manual RAID section where it gives the layout of RAID0 and 1 in diagram form. 
Title: Re: Mirror Drive 1 to Drive 2 without Raid
Post by: albert on July 20, 2011, 05:37:53 PM
TS, there are many ways to meet your requirement. You can use the cp (copy) command or rsync, google for more info.
Title: Re: Mirror Drive 1 to Drive 2 without Raid
Post by: hoppo1 on July 21, 2011, 01:43:10 AM
Use the local backup feature and just make sure you tick incremental otherwise it spends forever copying the same stuff in a loop depending how much data you have ( as I found out ).

I don't mirror my disks either. I backup to another nas box using rsync. always best not to keep all your eggs in one basket as they say.
Title: Re: Mirror Drive 1 to Drive 2 without Raid
Post by: oli_g on July 21, 2011, 11:56:05 PM
Hi,

I don't think RAID 1 is really a problem because you can take one of the disks, attach it to a Linux computer (e.g. in an external case and using Ubuntu from a USB stick) and then mount the corresponding partition. I worried about that RAID stuff, too and tested it. The file system could be accessed without problems.
In addition to having RAID 1 I do a regular backup to a USB disk attached to the DNS-320 using rsync.

Just try it ;-)

Oli
Title: Re: Mirror Drive 1 to Drive 2 without Raid
Post by: t121anf on July 23, 2011, 11:54:00 AM
It would be raid1 I would use

So should the worst happen I can remove the drives and read them in Linux?

Any one got a link to a boot cd that allow this, got a USB adapter for sata adapter so could test before putting to much data on the drives

Thanks all
Title: Re: Mirror Drive 1 to Drive 2 without Raid
Post by: ivan on July 23, 2011, 02:17:25 PM
In fact you have two choices.  If you are running windows you could use Ext2ifs driver installed on windows and read the USB directly, or get one of the live linux CDs (I think most linux distributions have them as a downloadable iso file that you burn to CD).

You should be able to find everything using google.