RAIDZ1 + USB NTFS backup drive

[marcelmmx]

Hi,
I am currently rebuilding my NAS with new drives and my idea is to use the following configuration:
3 NAS grade drives in a RAIDZ1 configuration and 1 large desktop grade drive where the entire contents of the raid pool would be backed up.
From what I found in the forums, it should be possible to mount an NTFS drive in Freenas - I would need to use USB connection here, as I am out of available SATA ports, and I also want that backup drive to remain portable so I can connect it directly to Windows machines if necessary.
The NTFS drive is in an external enclosure connected via USB 3.0 and I would only switch it on once or twice a month to do the backup.
My questions are:
1/ do you see this as a viable solution? If not, what would you change?
2/ what is the easiest way to set up some kind of automated backup in Freenas - only new data should be copied from the raid pool to the NTFS drive?
3/ will Freenas be ok if I just disconnect and reconnect the NTFS drive when it's idle?

Thank you in advance for your help.
Marcel

 

[danb35]

do you see this as a viable solution?

No.

If not, what would you change?

Use ZFS on the backup disk.

what is the easiest way to set up some kind of automated backup in Freenas

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/how-to-backup-to-local-disks.26/

 

[marcelmmx]

No.

Use ZFS on the backup disk.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/how-to-backup-to-local-disks.26/

Thank you for your reply.
Some more questions: is my solution outright impossible to implement or just difficult/cumbersome?
Using ZFS is not a good solution for me, as I need to connect the drive to Windows machines and should my NAS fail, the data on the backup drive will also be inaccessible (I don't have any Linux machines). Any other suggestions on how to implement this?
Marcel

 

[Linkman]

I would guess that the easiest method is to create a CIFS share on the NAS, attach the USB drive to your Windows box, mount the CIFS share on the Windows box, and use a Windows sync utility to copy from the NAS share to the USB drive.

If you need to write to an NTFS drive, and you are only switching it on occasionally, I don't see a more automated method off the top of my head (and as far as I know you can read from NTFS in FreeNAS in order to import data, but not write to it in FreeNAS).

 

[garm]

Any consumer computer would be able to run Ubuntu, TrueOS or literally anything else (short of MacOS) that would be able to import the ZFS backup drive. Now, as stated USB really isn’t ideal. When I connect external drives as part of drive rescue or import I use a eSATA port in one of my PCI slots. Backing up to NTFS is pointless ass you have none of the data integrity features of ZFS. So odds are uncomfortable high the data would be scrambled if you need to restore the drive.

The extra effort as described in the resource cited above is a really cheap price to pay to ensure some basic protection for your backup.

 

[marcelmmx]

Ok, I went with the suggested solution - i.e. connect the external drive to my PC via eSATA and use a Windows program to synchronize all data on the NAS with that on my hard drive. This is basically completely automated. Btw. I use Allway sync to sync the files. Thanks to all who submitted comments.