Newbie question about backup

[Bensmir]

Hello, I started my free trial last month to manage my music libraries and audio production data using drivepool to combine 5 nvme drives. So far I am convinced that I like the system and will buy it at the end of the trial.

Now I am a bit concerned about the backup. I don't really understand the whole thing about "duplicated" files. I didn't understand what settings to tweak

Currently my drivepool is 8,18 To (2.36 free).

Currently if one of my nvme drives fail, I loose all the data right ? 

If I buy a 10 To 3.5 HDD, what setup would you advise me to do ? Just manually copy pasting the pool folder to my hdd from time to time ? Setting up a mirror raid between the pool and the hdd ? Or some other settings inside Drivepool ? 

[Shane]

DrivePool's duplication is similar to RAID in that, when enabled, it can protect against one or more drive failures (see this recent thread where I explain that further as well as backup practices).

But the short answer is that if one of your drives failed (assuming you hadn't enabled duplication) you'd lose whatever was on that particular drive; the rest of your pool would remain intact - e.g. if you had song1.flac only on drive A and song2.flac only on drive B in your pool, and drive A failed, song1.flac would be lost and song2.flac would be kept.

Regarding buying a HDD - it seems like you want/need as little latency and as much speed as possible when working? So I'd keep the HDD separate from your pool of SSDs (maybe in its own pool if you plan to expand) and set up a scheduled automatic backup (whether that's a robocopy script, freefilesync mirror, veeam agent, etc) to happen while you sleep. Your mileage may vary of course.

[Chris_B]

Shane, I just wanted to jump in and thank you for the reference to FreeFileSync. I have been using another file backup/cloning tool for years. One of my backup sets of over 200,000 files was taking well over 5min to do the source/dest compare before the backup copy operation. FreeFileSync takes 3 seconds and that's not even using parallel operations that their donation edition supports. Still trying to figure out how they do the compare so fast as I see no resident process doing compare stuff in the background...Anyway, very happy with it. Thanks.