How stable are USB thumb drive pools?

[oguruma]

Part of my current back-up plan is to back-up a CIFS share to a USB thumb drive. Every 6 months or so, I place the thumb drive (has personal documents) into my safe deposit box. The idea being that if the house burns down or the machine with the drive is stolen, I at least have the majority of my personal files in a safe place.

My question is: how reliable is Freenas with supporting mirrored USB drives (for misc. data, not the OS)? It would be convenient to avoid the current process of having to sync files from the HDD to the thumb drive.

 

[Bidule0hm]

That's a terrible idea for at least 2 reasons: USB is not reliable (the two less reliable things, and by far, on my server are unreliable because they use USB...) and it's a very bad thing to degrade the mirror just so you don't have to sync the data (and in the end you'll need to do more things to manage the mirror each time you connect/disconnect your USB drive).

If you want to backup things on your USB drive the best thing to do is to connect it to a client and use a program to automate the process with just one click on a button ;)

 

[Mirfster]

Bidule0hm's right, seems like you have a good backup plan to keep a copy "off-site" (in your safe deposit). Not need to do anything to your main storage that would put it in jeopardy (using mirrored USB Drives for data).

BTW, hopefully you are copying the FreeNas configuration file to that USB as well? :)