Previous Thread
yes please, this would make a huge dif and really set this product apart.
When I saw someone asking about backing up the drive(s) connected to a Pogoplug in another thread, I immediately thought...
"Gee! How about adding software RAID to the Pogoplug? If it offered at least RAID 1, then I could take a couple of external drives, plug them into a USB hub connected to the Pogoplug, and immediately have full redundancy (if half the total storage capacity or less. TANSTAAFL). If it had RAID 5, I could do a hot swap of a bad drive! And RAID 6 would just be 'right out, man'."
As usual, the trick would be to make it as simple as possible to use. Drobo-like, basically.
June 10, 2009 6:27 PM
+1 I was also thinking if that could be extended to two pogoplugs acting together to achieve remote RAID. You know for situations like theft, fire damage etc, it really makes sense to have a remote back up to..
June 10, 2009 6:37 PM
updated: June 10, 2009 6:44 PM
A distributed RAID--interesting (maybe even great) idea! Pogoplug Central would track which Pogoplugs (and which volumes on each Pogoplug) contribute to a RAID, and their IP addresses. I'm uncertain how well the higher RAID levels would work with the high latencies involved (anyone? anyone?), but I'll be you could make Level 1 (straight mirroring) work. And you could speed up a rebuild just by temporarily directly connecting the new drive to the USB hub or LAN of the Pogoplug of the drive(s) you're restoring from.
June 10, 2009 6:48 PM
Can we get a cloud engines employee to comment to see if they have been thinking about this, if they have specific ideas, suggestions?
June 10, 2009 6:51 PM
how hard would it be to get mirroring to work, i assume since the pogo plug isrunning linux a open source back up util may work with a cron job?
June 10, 2009 8:43 PM
sassyp said: how hard would it be to get mirroring to work, i assume since the pogo plug isrunning linux a open source back up util may work with a cron job?
I do just that two 300GB hard drives which are connected to a non-powered USB hub. I have a cron job that runs on my notebook when I am home that launches the Linux client and then rsync keeps both drives in sync. If one drive fails I still have the other.
I have been thinking about purchasing another pogoplug to install at my parent's house so I have offsite storage. Use rsync to sync my drives here to my parents house so in the event of a disaster my data is still safe. Just a thought.
June 10, 2009 8:46 PM
that makes sense, but still, pogo plug should be able to do this on its own, it has a fully functional OS, i dont think having to have a PC on is practical. I'm sure there's a way to get this done with in the pogo plug.
June 11, 2009 4:36 AM
sassyp said: that makes sense, but still, pogo plug should be able to do this on its own, it has a fully functional OS, i dont think having to have a PC on is practical. I'm sure there's a way to get this done with in the pogo plug.
I'll have to ssh into my pogoplug but I don't think cron or rsync are available on the device. I am not that proficient with the Linux kernel but I would think it is possible to install these on the pogoplug. Depending on the size of the application. I'll have to investigate further and see if I can get them installed.
June 11, 2009 1:01 PM
updated: June 11, 2009 1:02 PM
For simple mirroring/RAID 1/backup/synchronizing, I suggest the following:
- User activates two different Pogoplugs. These appear in the web management app under "Settings".
- User connects at least one storage device (HDD, SSD, thumb drive, etc.) to each Pogoplug.
- Pogoplugs mount the storage devices, and they then appear in the web management app upon a page refresh associated with their respective Pogoplugs.
- A "Sync" link appears next to each mounted volume in the "Settings" page, just like "Eject" does now.
- User clicks "Sync" by the first of two volumes he wants to keep synchronized.
- Web management app brings up a dialog presenting a list of volumes that have the necessary capacity to match the selected volume, or states that there is no volume large enough available.
- If one or more sufficiently large volumes is available, they are displayed in a list with a "Sync" link similar to that in the "Settings" page next to their name.
- User clicks on the "Sync" link for the volume he wishes to use.
- Web applications asks if the user wants all data on the destination volume to be erased, or sychronized with the source drive (space permitting). User makes choice, with delete confirmation if that option is selected.
- Web application visually indicates somehow that the two selected volumes are now connected. Maybe they only appear now as one volume in a separate list of synchronized drives. An "Unsync" option now appears next to any synchronized volumes, possibly in lieu of the original "Sync" option to keep things simple.
- In Pogoplug Drive and the normal file management page of the web app, the two volumes should now appear as only one volume to users.
- Pogoplugs begin to merrily synchronize the volumes behind the scenes.
Anything a user uploads via the web app is automatically synchronized across the two volumes.
Anything a user does on a synchronized drive locally via Pogoplug Drive is mirrored on the other drive. Normal backup software can then be used if a user so desires, resulting in automatic off-site backup.
Now I know that things can be done with chron jobs and rsync, but I'm trying to think like the developers in keeping things simple for the casual user that is the market for the Pogoplug.
June 11, 2009 1:33 PM
I dont think two pogoplugs is the answer....pogoplug may disagree....its a great idea for off sites back ups....if we could mirror with one locally and have the option to send an off site to another, it would be perfect.
Did cron and rsync actually work?
June 11, 2009 2:39 PM
For local mirroring, I agree, only the one Pogoplug should be needed. But a second Pogoplug would pretty much be required for off site synchronization in order to locate both volumes on the Internet when DHCP is in use.
June 11, 2009 3:55 PM
I am doing so with rsync under Linux. I have (2) 300GB drives which I rsync on a nightly basis using a cron job. It isn't an inconvenience to me because the job runs on my notebook when I am home. It basically runs the Linux client and then rsync runs to sync the data on the two drives. So far, this method is working with no issues.
June 11, 2009 3:58 PM
we know we can do the above, but has anyone tried having the pogo plug do this on its own?
June 11, 2009 5:46 PM
It would be nice to get a thread going with a few guys and try and get disk syncing working insde the pogo plug -=]
June 12, 2009 1:30 PM
While this feature isn't on our roadmap at the present time, the discussion in this thread distracted Engineering for 10 minutes...it's a testament to how terrific an idea this is.
We hypothesize that you should first stop the Pogoplug service before attempting this. Otherwise, the Pogoplug will continue to mount your drives and RAID will be interrupted at the very least by "Pogoplug drive is unrecognized " notification.
Perhaps RAID-1 needs to be verified working on a desktop over USB before trying this on the Pogoplug.
Wiki post for reference http://linux-raid.osdl.org/index.php/RAID_setup
June 12, 2009 2:06 PM
with software mirroring, it shouldn't matter how the drives are mounted since a program is just syncing data...hardware raid yeah, USB wouldn't likely work. The beauty of this is if it works with two pogoplugs one on and off site and 4 drives, you would literally NEVER lose data.
Chris, when will a dev kit be out that mimics pogoplugs workings? You guys talked of this months ago.
June 16, 2009 9:34 PM
It would be great if this feature was supported by pogoplug. It has been my plan to do this myself with one pogo at home and one at a friends. I planned to then use the drive mapping software to map to both and use SyncBack to keep them in sync. It would be even better if didn't need to bother with the back up software and the pogoplug service did it for me.
June 19, 2009 8:33 AM
How about making the Pogoplug work with an unRAID box, http://www.lime-technology.com/joomla/ or make the Pogoplug work like the unRAID software. That would be really cool.
January 27, 2010 9:11 AM
Hi all:
Sorry to revive an old thread, but searches here and on the interweb's hasn't yielded much for me.
I see that the kernel on the Pogoplug v2 is RAID-ready (i.e. /proc/mdstat is present). However the tutorial in the link above only references RAID creation using md-adm, which isn't installed by default on the 'plug. Without trying to get OpenPogo (a.k.a. PlugApps now) running, is there any other way to create a local RAID array on the'plug?
I want to get simple RAID1 running on the plug to prevetn data loss in the event of a disk failre. That is a critical feature for me to be able to truly use the plug as my personal server without keeping a PC in my house running with a mirror of the data.
Any thoughts?
Thanks!
February 12, 2010 8:04 PM
Jason said:sassyp said: how hard would it be to get mirroring to work, i assume since the pogo plug isrunning linux a open source back up util may work with a cron job.
I do just that two 300GB hard drives which are connected to a non-powered USB hub. I have a cron job that runs on my notebook when I am home that launches the Linux client and then rsync keeps both drives in sync. If one drive fails I still have the other. I have been thinking about purchasing another pogoplug to install at my parent's house so I have offsite storage. Use rsync to sync my drives here to my parents house so in the event of a disaster my data is still safe. Just a thought.
I was thinking about doing his as well, but when pink was the only color option I passed and will wait.
March 10, 2011 2:45 PM
Reviving an old thread again...
While I would prefer some software solution (i.e. configure the Pogo to backup certain directories on one drive to directories on another drive or Pogo), perhaps a hardware solution like this (http://www.popdrive.com/) could be a stop-gap.
March 11, 2011 8:20 AM
updated: March 11, 2011 8:22 AM
I'm just going to hop in here and suggest that RAID over USB attached drives is likely a Dangerous Idea (tm). The very nature of USB is to have devices that can be added and removed upon whim, and a RAID requires a set of devices to always be connected at the same time, and when one or more is not present, that RAID ceases to function.
All of this comes back to USB being by nature, plug and play on whimsy.
Now, some sort of multi-point replication via DRBD or constantly active rsync, is a different story. Problems still exist there in the event that a drive disappears, goes belly up, or becomes unreachable.
October 13, 2011 8:28 PM
I am going to revive this thread yet again....
I just bough a MediaStore HF2-SU2S2 case, which holds 4 hard drives and connects by one USB/eSATA connector. I can connect it to my computer and with the 4X3TB drives and using Ubuntu SoftRaid, I see a 9TB RAID5 drive or 12TB JBOD. The really nice thing, is that since it is one enclosure, I do not have to worry about the disconnect suggested above.
Similar to the post above, it would be great to have this show up on my PogoPlug V2 as one drive instead of 4. Does anyone know where I would get the md-adm package to install and play with?
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