What if USB flash drive break on a working system

[armornone]

Hello.

 

If the USB flash drive breaks, does this destroy the array or can you just download another copy of the software and load it on a new USB flash drive?

 

Should you take an exact clone of your USB flash drive to plan for such an event? 

 

Please let me know if this is a weak spot in the system or how exactly you can recover/prepare for a USB drive breaking.

 

Thanks.

[Flibblebot]

The licence is tied to the HW ID of a particular flash drive, but if that fails, Tom is usually quite good at sending replacements (although this may take time). Alternatively, you could buy a twin-pack licence and keep one drive as a permanent backup.

[armornone]

The licence is tied to the HW ID of a particular flash drive, but if that fails, Tom is usually quite good at sending replacements (although this may take time). Alternatively, you could buy a twin-pack licence and keep one drive as a permanent backup.

 

Assuming you can get the license issue resolved( or that you are using the 3-drive free demo), what is going to happen to your data on your array when a new operating system is loaded from a freshly downloaded software? Does it just boot up as if the old disk was still there? I mean, are there certain configuration files stored on that USB drive about your data array that will be needed or what happens exactly?

 

I guess I should maybe buy a second USB flash drive and test it out of my demo setup.

 

Thanks.

[MTA99]

I would recommend you copy all the files on your flash drive to a safe location such that if your USB drive fails, you can copy everything to the new drive and carry on without a hitch.

 

You can however start from fresh and have the whole thing working in minutes. All you need to know is the assignment of your hard drives ie. which is the parity drive, which is disk1, disk2 etc. Your users, addons, security model etc will be gone but all your data is safe.

[lionelhutz]

You just re-assign the disks if you know your disk assignments. The data will be there when you start the array. Then, you have to re-create any users and re-enter the share settings.

 

You re-assign all the disks as data disks if you don't know your disk assignments. You can then look at the data and figure out which disk goes where. The unformatted disk is the parity. You will have to use the initialization (initconfig) when you put the parity back into it's proper place.

 

On a fresh start, unRAID just looks at the MBR of the disk. If it's a properly formatted unRAID disk then it's added to the array with data intact.

[S80_UK]

If it adds anything by way of confidence, today I upgraded motherboard and unRAID versions - see here...

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=19692.0

 

It "just worked" as they say.  So even if you do lose a USB drive, or your motherboard, or whatever, so long as you have your drives with their data, you can generally get going again.  You may need a little help, depending on your technical knowledge, but there's plenty of that around on this forum.

[kizer]

Like mentioned. Your data is safe on your drives. The only thing residing on your USB is the Operating system and the configuration files. Of course anything you add in the way of plugins or scipts also reside on the USB stick.

 

I have two pro USB's. One with 4.7 and one with 5x on it. I swap back and forth playing with the Beta's and my current build of 4.7. All I have ever done is run the permission script on my server when running 5x. Otherwise its a swap back and forth with no problem.