having trouble with external back up via USB3

[BorisBadenov]

I have a 5304T with two internal NAS-rated WD Red 8TB drives currently configured in RAID 1. I plan to expand this unit by adding a third 8TB WD Red and migrating to RAID 5.

Before I do that, I want to back everything up since the current configuration is almost full.

I have an 8TB drive (Seagate Barracuda) I planned to use as a backup drive, mounted in a dock and connected via USB3.

I have tried several times to back up to this unit but each time the backup fails and shows an error (error 5, I think).

The first time I got to 78% before it failed but the second time it only got to 2%

I originally formatted the drive in Btrfs but then I read it was not intended for this series of NAS so I reformatted it again in EX4.

I have tried putting the drive in the enclosure because I know it is possible to perform an internal back up but I cannot see how to send the backup to this drive.

At the moment, the backup drive is sitting in bay 4 and showing as inactive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Nazar78]

SSH into the NAS then check with the command dmesg. You would probably see some errors about disk failures.

1. Check the cable even if it seems good. Bad cables or connector could lead to errors, in my case my 4 of my 2 terabytes disks detected as several petabytes in the enclosure from bad USB3 cable.

2. Run smart monitor tools and/or surface test of the enclosure drive in another PC. If you have linux experience, try smartctl and/or badblocks on the NAS itself.

[orion]

I'll recommend you to create MyArchive in bay-4. You can then backup contents to this MyArchive drive.

[BorisBadenov]

Thank you both for your replies.

I ended up sending this through Rsync to the Thecus via network transfer and it worked. I suspect there was simply not enough buffer capacity running the drive on its own in a dock. I would almost certainly have got better transfer speeds doing what Orion suggested but I didn’t see that response until after I had started. The transfer took nearly two and a half days.

I should add that the Thecus was going to be given to me by someone else and arrived before I expected it, which made things much easier.

Thanks again.