Backing up a JBOD to smaller drives

[ninecows]

Hi

We have a 4 drive raid sonic array (IB-RD3640SU3 with 4x3TB) in JBOD mode so Mac OS X sees it as one big 12 TB volume.

We would like to make a incremental, monthly backup of the 12 TB volume and store it in another location, but how do I best do that?

We could buy an identical setup (so the RAID sonic box and 4 3 TB drives),but that's a bit expensive and overkill as we currently have used up 2 of the 12tb data.

Another strategy would be to buy external 3 TB drives one at the time as the storage need grows. But what would happen when the 12 TB has more than 3 TB data? Is there any backup software that can distrubute a >3 TB backup image over 2 or more 3 TB drives? Like in the old days of floppy drives (e.g. please insert disk 2 of 4 and so on)?

A third solution could be to manually split up the folders being backed up to fit on 3 TB drives, but that includes the risk of making mistakes (eg. missing a crucial folder)


Hope it make sense

 

[satcomer]

Use you array. Follow the steps in the blog post Configuring OS X Mountain Lion Time Machine to Work With CIFS (SMB) Share (don't worry it works in 10.7, 10.8 & 10.9). This way you can use you NAS for Time Machine (you just have to have a HFS+ partition on the NAS for this to work).

 

[ninecows]

Perhaps I was a bit unclear in my first post or I misunderstand the answer. I want to make incremental, monthly (or so) backups of my 12 TB array to something else (smaller external drives or what ever is cheapest).

No point in making a backup of the array to the array it self if it's hard drive failure or a fire I fear ;-)

Is it possible to back up a large volume (as an image?) distributed on to several smaller drives?