Well I my system has been up and running for a few days (burning in before I put any data on it). I got 0 errors so I decided to work on getting it to show up on my Mac, (working on installing avahi). There really should be a simple way or simple guide on doing this but that's another story.

The flash drive, a Lexar Firefly 2 GB, got fried when I was just about to plug it back into the server (static electricity). never had that happen before with other flash drives.

So my i put in my second flash which of course was not a clone so i have to wait for the parity check to finish in about 4 or 5 hours.

Bottom line is, is there a way to clone this to another flash on the Mac?

I don't think there is a way to clone a flash drive. There would be no point in locking unraid to one if that was the case. Also a note about Lexar usb sticks. I have had two die on me for no apparent reason back in 2004 or 2005 and personally vowed to never buy a Lexar product again. Maybe contact Limetech about the issue.

I'm currently running the free version until I get it all working and tested..

Cloning the drive (don't care about the license) would save a lot of time by having a current backup.. and not having to recreate everything.

Newegg is giving me full credit including shipping so I'll just find some new flash drives. Too bad these are a nice size.

I've got 3 others 2x PNY and a SanDisk I've had for years and never fried one even when they got zapped..

how do you zap em anyway?

 

i can see them just dieign for no reason or from wear, but being able to conclude that they died due to static dischrge is quite a feat.

how do you zap em anyway?

 

i can see them just dieign for no reason or from wear, but being able to conclude that they died due to static discarhrge is quite a feat.

 

Yes and I only touched the body and not the contacts.. Dry air and my body much be highly charged from years of working with electronics.. 

In unraid terms of USB drive backup, the only thing that need to be backup (after you've built and configured your unraid server) is the '\boot\config' folder. This 'config' folder holds all that is important to your unraid server, like configurations, licence (if you get/have one), disk, addons and shares information. Just make a backup of this folder via the flash drive share (needs to be enabled) and your sorted if your USB drive fails. You can also (if your paranoid) you can in fact make a image of a USB drive in Win XP using the Windows Backup utility. I would say there are a few free apps on the net which can do the same too. Bearing in mind if you purchase a licence (Works by getting the GUID from the actual USB drive that you unraid is installed on), it'll only work for that specific drive. Good Luck.