External drive RAID/Mirroring via USB on Qubes

User Support
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It has been quite some time since I have needed new external storage. I also recently purchased a Librem 14 with Qubes 4.1. I travel a lot and need a tough (as tough as electronics can practically be) RAID setup. Until now, I have been using USB connected drives with a software that does a CRC check and notifies me of the differences.

This allows me to manually copy what is needed. There are a couple of problems with this. The first being that some files are duplicated, while some are not copied at all because of me having to go through file lists manually.

So, I have been looking into a RAID setup. I require simple mirroring and 2x 4TB 2.5" drives should be more than enough. Technology has changed and I know some have put USB flash drives in RAID and done a lot of unique/strange things in RAID on other OS’s.

I prefer to get to external USB drives and put them in a RAID 1. My other option which probably would most definately work is to get a small-ish RAID rack and work off of that. But, I travel… A LOT. I work/live out of an 85L pack and weight is a major consideration. So I have some questions.

  1. Is RAID 1 using external USB drives, without a RAID rack possible using the Librem 14 on Qubes?
  2. If so, could someone point me to the correct way to set this up?

The consideration is that these would be connected to a USB port that is isolated within a VM that has no network access.

Thanks in advance for the tips.

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I have my (internal) drives for backup running raid 1 with software, it works out of the box. You need mdadm to set up the raid there are lots of guides on how to do this.

I don’t know if it works with USB drives but I can’t see why it shouldn’t work. but the raid is going to need to be resynced pretty often and with internal sata drives if around 1-2 hour per 1TB.

Have you considered just cloning the drives with rsync?

1 Like
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First, thanks for taking the time to post this. As for rsync, no I have not considered that. To be fair, I do not need the RAID 1 setup itself. I just need the drives to be mirrored with as little manual work to reduce human error as possible. I will look into it.

4

Moved to ‘User Support’ where it belongs.