TerraMaster F4-210

[dominikdeluxe]

Hello,

I purchased a TerraMaster F4-210 along with 4TB IronWolf HDDs on black Friday to replace my two old WD NASs and an ext. USB HDD with each 2TB.
setup is/ was 2TB prime storage with nightly backup to the other NAS. The USB storage usually stays at my parent's house as an offsite backup. Then very no and then I connect via USB to the prime and after a night a new backup is done.

My goal:
What I would like to do is to have a fast 4TB NAS Storage with a daily Backup and an offsite backup.

What I expected to do:
Use rsync to copy the full content of the first HDD to the second HDD on a daily schedule.
Occasionally insert the third HDD for offsite backup and start the rsync manually. I don't want to hassle with the USB cables and stuff anymore and figured just to smoothly insert the drive would be cool.

I am now in a test phase and so far my experience is quite bad. It seems like it is completely not designed to (shutdown) change any HDD.
The NAS is running TOS 4.2. One it didn't turn off anymore and I needed to pull power.
The NAS crashed a couple of times. Or restarted without nginx and ssh.
Most of the time I needed to start with the initialization, which caused a full reset.

First thing first. Is this even possible to achieve this with the TerraMaster F4-210?
If yes. How.
If not, ok, no problem. Will return all the shiny new stuff.

[dominikdeluxe]

Didn't find the edit function.

Thanks for helping.
Best Dominik

[TMzethar]

Firstly, the hard drives used for F4-210 internal slots need to be formatted into dedicated storage partitions and structures.

Similar to Windows, the TOS system is installed on the hard drive. Please do not unplug the hard drive that has already installed the storage configuration during runtime to avoid causing abnormalities.
It is possible for Rsync to backup the content of HDD1 to HDD2 on a daily basis.
It is possible to occasionally insert a third HDD for Rsync backup, but it is not supported to directly insert the third HDD for reading, building, and mounting during F4-210 runtime. You need to restart F4-210 to have the third HDD recognized.

We are not sure under what circumstances the collapse you mentioned occurred.
We are not sure if it is a usage issue or a hard drive issue.
Regarding usage, as mentioned above, please do not unplug it when it is already used as storage.
If you are using a hard drive from another device, please save the data first, then use the hard drive tool to check the health status and delete the partition, and finally put it into F4-210 for formatting and use
We can only guess the problem based on some of your descriptions, hoping to answer some of your doubts. If you still have questions, please describe it.

What edit function are you referring to? edit the storage pool? or volume? If you could provide screenshots or more descriptions, it would be helpful for us to determine the problem.

[dominikdeluxe]

Hallo, thank you. I will try it this way. Sounds good.

[dominikdeluxe]

Hello, yes I was successful. Appreciate your support. Now running 16TB of storage with RAID0 or SingleDisk serving different purposes.

The key is to install OS on the drive which never gets removed.
Question: What happens to the other drives if the drive containing the OS fails?

So backup on a schedule from Volume#1 to #2 works fine. Occasionally switch a drive and running a backup works as well. I hope you plan to develop a way easier way for backups.

Data browsing and management eg. copy, delete etc. works fine using the browser UI.

Couple things I noticed that I didn't figure out or were just weird and needed a workaround.

1. The Rsync user provided in the rsync server settings is not listed in the user list. Which makes configuring access rights complicated or too open.
2. Not possible to grant access to the user's domain folder to other users.
3. Presence of the appdata folder. This can easily hidden though.
4. Multiple checkbox options where no multi change is possible eg. the "shared folder" setting.

Speed and responsiveness are satisfying. 100-110MB/s using stardard. gigabit ethernet. From a local machine copying files.

Regards Dominik

[dominikdeluxe]

ps.
I guess I would prefer and feel safer if the OS was installed on an internal storage.

To be honest I hoped for the mentioned (https://www.amazon.de/gp/customer-revie ... B07QXWJ612) F5 board with 5 slots. Whereas the hidden one would be used with an old spare SSD to host the system.

[TMzethar]

Each disk you install on F4-210 has an OS backup. Generally, if the OS is damaged, the OS partition of other hard drives will replace the damaged OS.

[Gremlin]

Each disk you install on F4-210 has an OS backup. Generally, if the OS is damaged, the OS partition of other hard drives will replace the damaged OS.

Hate to be pedantic (not really) but RAID is not a backup! If a DISK is damaged/off-line, the other members of the OS array may still function. If the OS is "damaged" ie deleted/overwritten then all members of the array may be damaged as it's a Raid 1 Mirror.

[TMzethar]

Although it's for the convenience of explaining to someone, thank you for adding. Yes, the OS partitions are distributed on each hard drive and they are RAID1.