Installed 9.10.2 to 16GB USB drive. Wondering how to make this redundant

[Rich Wagner]

Good morning,

I installed 9.10.2 to a 16GB USB drive yesterday and configured it. Everything works fantastic but I'm worried about my drive failing over time. I have a couple of questions I hope someone can answer for me.

1) If the USB drive fails,and I configure a new USB drive to take its place, do I lose all my configurations?

2) If I attach a secondary drive to the system is it better to attach it to freenas-boot or stripe? Will either get me back up and running if the primary USB fails? What's the difference between the two?

3) What steps have you taken to prevent a USB drive failure from taking down your NAS?

Thank you,

Rich

 

[Redcoat]

Good morning,

I installed 9.10.2 to a 16GB USB drive yesterday and configured it. Everything works fantastic but I'm worried about my drive failing over time. I have a couple of questions I hope someone can answer for me.

1) If the USB drive fails,and I configure a new USB drive to take its place, do I lose all my configurations?

2) If I attach a secondary drive to the system is it better to attach it to freenas-boot or stripe? Will either get me back up and running if the primary USB fails? What's the difference between the two?

3) What steps have you taken to prevent a USB drive failure from taking down your NAS?

Thank you,

Rich

Try a search in the whole forum for "Boot USB" or similar - you will find literally hundreds of postings on all topics of this subject that are highly educational.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

do I lose all my configurations?

Make sure you always have a backup of your configuration, then you don't have to worry about it any more.

 

[cangeek]

I am using dual SanDisk extream 16GB - USB3 plugged into USB2 ports. I have had this mirror config for past six months with no issues

 

[JohnDigital]

As has been pointed out, make sure to backup your config within the GUI. Now with that said, before you get too far along, you might want to install freenas to a pair of USB drive (or more, think 4 USB drives in Z2 for absolutely no worries). Then (at least) one drive can fail, leaving the other intact to boot while you replace the failed one. This simple command added to a cron task will backup your config automatically so you always have it.

cp /data/freenas-v1.db "/mnt/TANK/`date \+%Y\%m\%d`.db" replace TANK with the name of your pool. You can add a CRON task and run this as frequently as you like as the .db files it creates are tiny.