Backup By Disk Swapping?

Question

I have a Duo V1 with the latest firmware. I have two disks in it running XRAID 1 and I have a spare disk. Is there any reason why I shouldn't just hot swap in the spare every weekend to get my backup? I am then able to get the spare offsite which I like better than backing up to an onsite USB drive.

If the NAS then fails for some reason and I am unable to recover from the two disks (which I've seen happen in the forums) would i be able to simply put my backup disk in there and be up and running, minus redundancy until I get a new couple of disks?

Thanks for any thoughts,

Sean

mdgm-ntgr · Answer

sqflynn wrote:Is there any reason why I shouldn't just hot swap in the spare every weekend to get my backup?Yes. If you value your data you shouldn't do that. RAID and backups are two very different things. Don't confuse the two. When you hot-swap a drive back in there'll be a resync putting heavy stress on all disks.Also handling disks bare you risk damaging it without realising it. There's the very real possibility that you damage the disk you remove, the disk that remained in the NAS fails during the resync and the disk you hot-add hasn't finished syncing so is useless as well.I'd suggest you rotate USB disks off-site.

fbmachines · Answer

One more thing to consider is that the backplane connectors in the NAS would take a lot of extra abuse due to the frequent plugging/unplugging. IMHO, I would think it wouldn't take long for damage to occur.

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Backup By Disk Swapping?

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