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Forum Discussion
janpeter1
Jan 05, 2016Luminary
Scrubbing a single disk?
Hi I use ReadyNAS 314 and run the latest firmware 6.4.1. I have read through the manual and I just would like to understand something more of scrubbing. I also googled around a bit and read for...
janpeter1
Jan 05, 2016Luminary
Thank you Stephen!
I also found two links that gives slightly expanded information:
The Wikipedia BTRFS article - and go the secdtion Checksum tree and scrubbing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Checksum_tree_and_scrubbing
Also the Stack Overflow site has couple of texts worth reading for a layman.
http://superuser.com/questions/904331/how-does-btrfs-scrub-work-and-what-does-it-do/1008260
StephenB
Jan 05, 2016Guru - Experienced User
janpeter1 wrote:
Also the Stack Overflow site has couple of texts worth reading for a layman.
http://superuser.com/questions/904331/how-does-btrfs-scrub-work-and-what-does-it-do/1008260
I don't recommend this one. The commments on "burning in hard drives" and real-world disk reliability are questionable at best.
From a layman perspective, the key things are
(a) no single device or service (disk, NAS, PC, cloud, etc) is 100% reliable, so if you put your data on just one device you will eventually lose it.
The implication is that you need at least two copies (original and one backup) on different devices of anything you really care about. I recommend three copies (and I ignore RAID redundancy for this).
(b) It's important to identify disk problems early, especially with RAID arrays.
One implication here is that you should set up a volume maitenance schedule that includes regular disk tests, scrubs, balances, etc. And that you should set up email alerts on the NAS so that you are told about any issues that it sees. It is also important to regularly verify that your backups can still be read (I learned this one the hard way).
A second implication is that when the NAS does tell you about disk problems, you should address them right away. Delay adds to the risk.
- janpeter1Jan 05, 2016Luminary
Good!
I fully agree on the need to do regular backups of your NAS.
As you say, files that you do not have on three places do not really exist...
I read the other day that the upcoming 6.4.2 will be able to recognize BTRFS in an external HD.
Do you think this means that one can sort of gurantee the "BTRFS-data integrity" when doing back-up
which we after all do not have today?
- StephenBJan 05, 2016Guru - Experienced User
janpeter1 wrote:
Do you think this means that one can sort of gurantee the "BTRFS-data integrity" when doing back-up
which we after all do not have today?
I don't know. But being able to enable checksums and do a scrub on an external BTRFS volume makes a lot of sense to me.
Maybe post it in the ideas exchange subforum, to put it on Netgear's radar...
- janpeter1Jan 07, 2016Luminary
Hi,
I will post this idea about securing backup, although to get checksums of for the external HD for backup I agree would be a great step.
The other day I ran scrub on my two volumes, first the raid and then the jbod volume and got no errror in the system log.
According to the manual (last version) on page 194-195 it looks as scrubbing error would turn up in the system log and not
in some other more difficult to read log - is that rightly understood?
The time for scrubbing was:
0.99 TB data on 2x4 TB raid volume - 11:52 hr
0.69 TB data on 1x4 TB jbod volume - 2:53 hr
For the raid volume the data is dominated by photos typically 1-20 MB
For the jbod volume it is backup of 3 Macs and more varying size of files
Nothing else was done by the NAS during the time
Somwehat interesting that the raid volume seems to take more than double time to do the scrubbing,
but to make a fair comparision one most likely should have the same data on the two volumes.
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