How do people backup their usb sticks?

[Dimtar]

So unRaid is great, it runs off a usb stick but that stick contains alot of important information such as configuration settings and the location of drives etc. in the array.

How do people back this up?

 

My plan is to setup a nightly rsync to a part of the array that is backed up to Crashplan. Maybe to schedule nightly backups would be a good idea for someone to write?

Maybe I am over thinking this.

[itimpi]

So unRaid is great, it runs off a usb stick but that stick contains alot of important information such as configuration settings and the location of drives etc. in the array.

How do people back this up?

 

My plan is to setup a nightly rsync to a part of the array that is backed up to Crashplan. Maybe to schedule nightly backups would be a good idea for someone to write?

Maybe I am over thinking this.

I think you are probably over-thinking it!

 

It would be sufficient to simply copy all files on the USB stick any time you make a change.  Note that you want to do this with the array stopped as otherwise if you every have to use the backup copy unRAID will think you have done an unsafe shutdown and force a parity sync.

[SSD]

A USB backup can be a dangerous thing. It contains your disk configuration. Say you took a backup and later added a new parity drive, using your existing parity drive as a data drive. If you ever used your usb backup, it would revert your configuration to the old structure and your old parity would be in the parity slot and any data on it would start getting clobbered. It is the disk.cfg and super.dat files that contain these configurations.

 

Another issue is that the super.dat file is updated every time the array is started or stopped. If you backup the file while the array is active, and restore it later, it will detect a dirty shutdown and trigger a parity check. Combining this with the example above of your data drive getting put back in the parity slot and you have a real disaster on your hands, because "parity" will start being written to at 100 MB/sec in an attempt to "correct" parity errors which it will detect on most every sector. What that will really be doing is riddling you data with bullets.

 

Please take this into consideration with backup usb drives. I take a periodic backup as it contains some files, like the go file and some scripts I write for various purposes, that I am interested in saving, but I have never used a backup directly. In truth, rebuilding a usb is typically quite easy with a screenshot of your current array configuration.