... I thought that my 10 year old (yes, I looked) Seagate Barracuda 160GB HDD, run solo 24/7 for the last 7 years, was hair-raising enough (although long-time SME-user Hawk, apparently only recommends a solo HDD set-up "I don't trust RAID and think that it slows the server down, I just have a good back up system")
These stories of cheapo HDD failures will keep me awake at night
Well - SUCCESS. Really pleased this end. Thank you TerryF and ReetP. That
'Console Backup' to/from USB drive was totally PAINLESS. I don't know how I missed this upgrade / back-up technique all these years. What has had me dancing a jig all around the kitchen is that I haven't had to reload my Contribs or iBay software, or hook up a database - it was all done for me - Wahooo!
You know, I run some 'accounts' on my little server (PhreeBooks -
https://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,53746.0.html) and I have been wondering how I might save my set-up to an annually produced DVD with PDF copies of all invoices etc. I had all sorts of convoluted plans - but no, now all I need is this
'Console Backup' to/from USB and I can recreate my accounts EXACTLY as they were the day after I prepared them - every year going forward. Breakthrough! And so easy.
LEARNINGS (for me):
- how super-easy this upgrade method is. I have used the AFFA (rise) method before and didn't like it anyway near as much.
- I was surprised to find that using the
'Console Backup' to/from USB method meant that I got an exact copy install on my new OS - up and running IMMEDIATELY. No messing about re-installing Contribs / databases / iBay software.
- I did my back-up and restore to an 8GB pen-drive (2.2 GB .tgz file). It worked FINE. I was expecting it to take ages to download/upload. No, < 30 mins. I am sure that I should have used a proper big-boys external HDD.
That was a great Koozali / SMEserver experience. Thank you for your help.
ReetP a question - You mention "or run a 3 drive RAID 1" - is this using the 3rd WD-1TB-Blue as a 'Hot-spare'? I must read up on that. Do I add it through the Console?
Note - During the Koozali-9.2 install I noticed, amongst all the lines and lines of info flying up the screen, that my new HDD's had been auto-formatted during the install procedure to Ext4.