I was running my NAS with the following configuration for a while (HP Microserver):
Disk 1: Disk with the OS
Disk 2: 1tb in raid1
Disk 3: 1tb in raid1
Now I added a 4th disk for internal backup of the raid1
Disk 4: 500GB (will be changed to 1tb as soon as I have more data on the raid) for internal backup.
Now I have connected a external hard drive via a e-sata docking station to make external backups.
Disk 5: 500GB external backup.
OK, so before I left for a trip I wanted to backup the data quickly, so I put the Disk 5 into the docking station, created a share and used rsync to backup disk 4 to disk 5. Worked well as far as I could tell. But I am not sure if this was correct or if there is a better way to do this than to create a share, etc. Because when I came back from my trip I had some troubles booting the NAS because of missing disks (see my post here http://forums.openmediavault.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2292). I solved that (not sure how and if it was totally correct, but for now it works).
Any thoughts on this? I want the external backup, so that I am able to have 2 disks that I can take home and rotate (weekly backups, so each disk would have the data during 2 weeks).