Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming An Alternative Way to perform Sooloos Backups

Hi John,

Your TwinStores will run just fine with one drive, obviously you then have no redundancy, as I understand it you must have two drives if you have no data, eg: a new install, and are formatting the drives in the TwinStore, if you are just replacing a faulty drive then it will be formatted and re-synchronised with the existing drive.

Russ

A quick follow up to Ronnie's original suggestion.

I can confirm that the Icy Box device does indeed clone a HDD from a Sooloos storage device (MD600 in my case). Mine is using RAID 0 so I cloned both drives onto a new pair of 3TB drives.

Clone time was approx 7 hours for each 3TB drive and pretty easy to do even if the instructions are a bit brief and misleading in one part.

Both new drives back into the MD600 and all works perfectly.

There has been some discussion about how many times HDD should be inserted/removed from devices, time to clone, clone being full not incremental etc.

I have now set up the following to address those valid points and minimise downtime in any recovery scenario:-

1) MD600 holds my master 6TB library as a single drive RAID 0 seen as \\192.168.1.10\music on my network.

2) 6TB NAS holds a full copy of the Sooloos \\music share which is copied over via FreeFileSync.

3) Batch job set to run FreeFileSync weekly so NAS is always pretty up-to-date. I may set this to daily as if nothing is changed there is no overhead.

4) Should either of the HDD in the MD600 fail I can replace with them both with original pair. The original pair will not be up-to-date, BUT,

5) I will use FreeFileSync to sync the up-to-date NAS copy back to the MD600. This will of course be incremental so avoids the need to create full HDD clones each time a back up is updated. Incremental sync will take small minutes not hours.

Note:- if you don't have a the spare copy HDD's available then upon any failure you are doing the full sync back any new drives you have to buy for the failed unit. This is fine but takes longer for larger libraries.

If systems with multiple stores can see each store as something like "\\192.168.1.10\music" then the approach will work just the same without any need for turning off machines or alternating tags. Just repeat the sync for each store.

You don't need to use a NAS as the up-to-date copy. An external HDD will do fine if your library fits.

Hope that is useful to some.

Thanks for that Nick and it answers the question I raised in the other thread. "Official" backup methods suggested by Meridian are not only painfully slow but if not done carefully could result in something of limited use in the case of drive failure.

I can see that my present habit of backing up two 2TB raid setups onto the one 3 TB HDD is useless unless I am prepared to restore both the failed TwinStore and the other one in the case of breakdown, something which would take many days and possibly have the system unusable.

Hi,

How can I use this in a situation where I have a full 1 TB Raid 1 TS and want to "back it up", install two 3 TB drives with Raid 1 and get the music back into the TS?

Regards
Christofer

If you understand the flow here then it would be to copy out the music share contents, install new HDD and sync back the folders to the new share.

As Sooloos backup is not very robust (stopping etc with not audit) you may find this route more robust. I use freefilesync to do this which DOES provide an audit trail.

OK Nick,

So I have downloaded freeFileShare (Mac) and I can see my NAS in the finder as a shared volume, but I can't see the TwinStore... Do you by chance know what I should do to make it visible for the finder and freeFileShare, so I can cope out the files?

Rgds,
Christofer

Goto osx go/connect to server menu or command K

Enter as server address

When prompted, you want to connect as guest.

Thanks a million!

Christofer

Please let us know how it goes, how long it takes etc.

Cheers

Well after some more reading I found an old post by Ian with this http://[core IP]/debug.
After looking at the debug data I found out that I was trying to connect to the wrong IP address.

So now I have an Smb connection to the Store

One step forward.

This is a great forum!!!

Christofer

Well I started up a Mirror via FreeFileSync between the TwinStore and my NAS but stopped it since the predicted time was 5 days with a transfer speed of just 2 MB/s.

My Mac was connected to the network via WiFi, so I did a second attempt wile connected via a cable, then it showed 28 days with an average sped of 300 KB/s.

Something must be wrong here, any guesses?

My TwinStore is connected to the SourceOne via Cat7,
My NAS is connected to the Source:One via Cat7
The ID41 is connected to the Source:One via Cat7 and
the Source:One is connected to the router via Cat7.

The router is a Netgear CG3100 (Comhem) and the NAS is a Dlink-320L with 2*3TB Seagate Baracuda ST3000DM001 7200 rpm.

Just a normal copy of 500 MB from the TwinStore to the NAS takes 15 min.

Regards,
Christofer

The Source:One has a switch in it, but is it Gigabit? I wonder if you might do better with everything plugged into a separate Gigabit switch?

Certainly avoid wireless.

People with substantial collections have spoken of days before...