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Small NAD RAID1/mirror vs. alternatives

stevech

Part of the Furniture
Is this a valid concern:

If I use a two-bay NAS and mirror the drives, and use QNAP or Synology, if the controller/electronics fail, am I hosed? Can I take one of these drives and put it into a Linux machine and mount it as a common Linux file system? And then get at my data?

Versus

A "NAS", one-bay, to get the NASes serving software features, but backup the one bay drive to second external drive connected by eSATA or USB, where that drive assuredly will be readable under Linux or if FAT32/NTFS, readable under Windows. The backup would be a volume sync or program like SecondCopy or whatever, rather than RAID. This protects from a NAS controller fault.

My current system is a Windows PC with motherboard RAID1. Though I've not confirmed, if the motherboard smokes, I supposedly have two ordinary NTFS disks that can be data disks in any windows PC.
 
As long as the Linux machine can mount an EXT3 or EXT4 drive, you should be able to get at least some of your data back. All depends on the failure mode.

Backing up to an external drive that uses a Windows-readable format is much less hassle to move to a computer and, assuming failure isn't during a backup, all your data should be intact.
 
ideally you could use both..

raid-1 for mirroring, would protect against a single disk failure

external usb/esata drive, would protect against 2 disk failures, accidental/on-purpose deletes/changes, controller/device failure, etc.

The benefit of using raid-1 vs external backup alone, would be that you would not have to go through the hassle and downtime of restoring data (and any loss of data since the last backup).
 
Thanks.
I've read stories about people with RAID1 that are hosed when the electronics/contoller fail and the drives are OK. But some controllers use a proprietary format or partition table or some such where drives are unreadable as a single drive under Linux or Windows. And if motherboard RAID1, a new mother board, different chipset, may mean the RAID1 cannot be migrated.
 
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