Having 2nd USB Flash Drive Mounted as Backup

[Stokkes]

Hi All

 

I recently had a USB drive die which caused a problem since my server is remote and not in my home. It just so happened where the server is located, there was nobody home for 3 days so my server was completely offline (I have remote access to the IPMI, but you obv can't replug a usb!).

 

I replaced the USBs and now have 2 of them that are identical. My goal was to boot with the primary while having the secondary one plugged in. However I'm running into a problem. UnRAID seems to mount BOTH USBs to /boot on boot up. 

 

I'd like to have both mounted (backup using unassigned devices) so I can regulary rsync the primary to the secondary in the event I have another failure. 

 

I figure Unraid is mounting both because they are identical and have the same volume Label (UNRAID) - anyone know how I can accomplish what I'm out to accomplish?

 

Thanks!

 

[itimpi]

Are both of these separately licensed copies so you can boot from either without going through the license transfer process?

 

You could give one of them a different label (e.g. UNRAID-BACKUP) and then adding something like 

unraidlabel=UNRAID-BACKUP

to the 'append lines in the syslinux.cfg for the backup copy.  Which one gets mounted as /boot then depends which one you boot from (as long as the BIOS can tell them apart).   This is the technique I use for running Unraid VMs under my main Unraid server for development purposes.

[Stokkes]

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you! It works perfectly and I can boot from both from the menu.

 

The 2nd USB isn't licensed but that's fine.. Primarily I wanted to ensure I could boot from either in the event of a failure and no remote hands are available to swap the USBs.. If that happens I'll go through the license transfer process.

 

Thanks again!