Hello - From time to time I need to remove my unRAID drives for safe keeping and still be to restore my archive if my unRAID hardware is stolen.  I also only have one hot swappable bay.  Question: would it be better to remove and safe keep the data drives or the mirror drive for this purpose.  Again - of these two approaches which would allow the most reliable means of restoring my archive in new hardware without a complete set of  drives.  Thanks much for your advise.

There is no mirror drive. All of the data drives are required. Duplicate each drive using the swap bay.

 

dd will duplicate each drive but will take a long time.  rsync can copy the files and in subsequent copies will only update the changes. 

It appears you do not understand how unRAID works at all. The parity drive is not a mirror drive. The array works similarly to a RAID4 array. You need every other drive if you want to recover the one that has failed or is missing.

 

Also, are you expecting this to be capable of swapping drives in and out of the system at will so you can store them someplace? unRAID doesn't work that way. The array should be considered a complete set of disks, including both the data and parity disks. You should expect to keep the complete set of parity and data drives together at all times. You could pull the complete set of drives and store them somewhere. If you did that, then I'd also make a backup of the USB flash drive or keep the USB flash drive with the disk drives.

Thanks Guys - I miss spoke in calling the parity drive a mirror drive.  I'm not trying to swap drives.  I need to remove my drives (backup of my digital life) from my home when I gone for long periods of time.  You have answered my question and then some.  I will invest in another hot swappable drive system to allow me to readily remove my complete drive set (including a backup unRAID USB drive) for off-site storage.  Many thanks for clarifying my idea for the process.  Take care.

Set up a second server at a remote location and then using rsync/vpn over the Internet. This way you can back each other up every night,