Copy to another hard drive

[Wops95]

Hi I'm looking for a way to copy the data on one of my hard drives to another on a weekly basis. I know this can be setup using raid, however I want it to also act as a temporary backup incase files are accidentally deleted off the first hd. Is there something already setup to be able to do this or a cron command that I can run?

Thanks
Kieran

 

[Nick2253]

You're going to have to provide more information for us to help you

I'd start by perusing the forum rules (red link on top), which will give you a sense of what you need to provide, so that way we know what your setup is, and what you are trying to accomplish.

Since it's not clear from your post that you're even running FreeNAS, once you get some more details on the page, I'll be back and see if we can figure it out for ya!

 

[Wops95]

Ah ok my bad, I have FreeNAS installed on a custom system. The drives in question are 2 x 3tb western digital drives one of which is used as a plex media server. With the other I would like a method within FreeNAS to copy the data from the first drive onto the second. I could do this via CIRS I believe, but would ideally like to find a way within the FreeNAS software. I'm on version 9.10, just after an idea of how I might go about this please? Would be happy to provide more details if required.

 

[Nick2253]

I'm still very confused about your setup.

You say you have two 3TB hard drives. I'd normally assume that both of these hard drives are part of the same pool. But then you say that one is used as a Plex Media server. That makes me extremely suspicious that you have a funky setup.

Can you please be more specific with your setup? What is your boot device? How are your drives configured in FreeNAS? What kind of data are you trying to move? When you say CIRS, what do you mean? (If you mean CIFS, then I'm even more confused, since CIFS is a networking protocol...) Also, I'm assuming that you have Plex setup in a jail. Is that the case?

Gazing in to my crystal ball, and trying to read around what you are saying, I'm assuming that you are trying to do the following: configure FreeNAS as a NAS, and run Plex as a jail in FreeNAS. You have two 3TB hard drives, and you'd like to have data redundancy, but also have the ability to restore from an accidental file deletion.

Assuming that this is the case, you really should just put the two drives in a mirror, and add periodic snapshots. Then, if you accidentally delete something, you can just restore from a snapshot, and you'll be good to go.

I would strongly recommend you read the sticky "Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!" That will help you understand the underlying terminology and functionality of ZFS.

 

[depasseg]

Yes, it's very simple.

1. Create 2 pools (primary and backup).
2. Configure a snapshot schedule for your primary pool (including child datasets)
3. Configure replication from your primary pool to backup pool.

If you just want to ability to go back in time, you can just stop at step 2.