I've been tinkering with this for several weeks now and wanted to run my needs and current work-in-progress by everyone to get feedback and suggestions.

 

We have an office setup with 3 daily users and 3 more that occasionally connect to our network. We are using a firewall and unifi wifi system. I have installed VEEAM on the laptops and take incremental backups daily at lunchtime for the daily users. The backups share is on the cache drive.

 

I would like to have the drive with backups spin down so it's semi air-gapped other than the one hour or so we are actively making backups. I have found that VEEAM needs access to both the cache and to see the other incremental backups so the array drive must be spun up when the process starts.

 

Using chatgpt I have written user scripts for the following:

Spin up the drive - set on a schedule

Spin Down - also on schedule

Mover Watcher - to move the daily backups off the cache to the array once it detects activity has stopped

 

I think I just about have everything close to working, but the drive I am using is a Seagate Ironwolf 12tb. I think it's not cooperating with the scripts, maybe because it's designed to be used 24/7.

 

My initial questions are:

• Is there an easier way to accomplish what I'm trying to do with making the drive more inaccessible when not in use?
• Should i have gotten a different type of drive with this goal in mind?
• Is there a workaround to get the drive to spin down? Chatgpt mentioned the hd-idle plugin, but I couldn't find it in the app store.
• Is there a way that I could fully air gap a drive on the array or would I need to make it an unassigned device?

Let me know what else I can provide and thanks in advance for your input!

Not sure that what you are doing will achieve what you want as if there is any attempt to access a spun down drive it is automatically spun up.  Do not see any point therefore in your scheduled spin down and spin up.

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

Not sure that what you are doing will achieve what you want as if there is any attempt to access a spun down drive it is automatically spun up.  Do not see any point therefore in your scheduled spin down and spin up.

Thanks, thats good to know.

 

If I were to move the drive from the array to unassigned devices do you think I'd be able to do something similar by mounting and unmounting the drive on a schedule?

1 hour ago, jhugo said:

If I were to move the drive from the array to unassigned devices do you think I'd be able to do something similar by mounting and unmounting the drive on a schedule?

That would probably work OK as long as you made certain the Unassigned Devices plugin does not automatically mount the drive.
 

You need to remember that a malicious actor that gained access to your system could still manually mount the drive but it would be much less likely to be an automated attack.