Hyper Backup to USB external HDD issue

[jumpinwired]

Hello,
So I had a heck of a scare about an hour ago when I looked at my Nas during a backup process and I saw 3 out of 4 drives had a solid orange light.

My question right now has to do with a change I made the other day. Is there any reason to believe that hyper Backup would take significantly longer to backup to an HDD formated in exFat than if it were formated in ext4?

I'll try to keep this short but no promises. I watched spacerex a few days ago and he said to use exFat if you want to access your files on a windows PC (if the Nas completely fails I assume). So I moved my hbk file and reformatted the external HDD to exFat. Learned that the backup will fail the task if you try to relink the old file from the previous format(ext4).

So I started a completely new backup task and it seemed to work. My first attempt copied way more than I intended, my fault, I don't know. I deleted that and checked my settings and started again. About 7 hours later, I looked at my Nas hoping it was done and that is when I saw the 3 orange lights on the hard drive LEDs.

I just about died because I thought I had wiped the old ext4 backup so I thought I lost everything. I couldn't get logged in and it said login time out and another time it said check your network connection. I finally was able to login after about 30+ minutes of trying. Everything looked like it was still working and I could see my files. No error notification on any channel. I checked again shortly after and the 3 lights returned to blinking green.

The transfer rate dipped down below 1MB/s so I was shocked at how long it was taking. Previously I did a backup with the ext4 format and took about 4hrs 45min for 280GB, but right now with the exFat format I'm only at 253GB in 9hrs.

My temperatures seem to be ok. 36c on 3 of them and 40c on the other. I went ahead and adjusted my fan settings from cool mode to full mode and it has brought the temps down a few degrees so I'm just going to leave it like that, at least until this process finishes.

I'm definitely running an extended s.m.a.r.t. test on my drives as soon as possible.

Is there any reason the 3 lights turned orange for awhile but everything seems to be operating normally? I'm sure there are some things I forgot to mention that might be helpful but I will be glad to answer any questions you guys have.

Thanks for the help

Btw, I did recopy my original backup file on to the external HDD before I started the new backup task, so…I wouldn't have lost almost anything important anyways.

[jumpinwired]

Just an update.

Everything still seems to be operating fine but I'm about 17 hours in on this backup and it was at about 730GB when I left my house a couple of hours ago.

The problem with that is my source folders are only around 400GB so I must have the task settings wrong or something else is going on. To be clear I have about 4.6 TB on my Nas which is mostly movies so it must be backing up those files when I didn't intend to.

I have Drive Application backing up and it does say video folder for the shared folder. I messed with the permissions for Drive a couple of days ago so I must need to change that back. 

Thanks

Still wondering about the orange lights I saw.

[ed]

For the slow backup speed with the exFAT formatted external HDD, it’s likely because exFAT is less efficient than ext4 when used for large data transfers. exFAT isn’t optimized for tasks like backup and can lead to slower speeds, especially when working with large files or many small files. The fact that your backup process is taking significantly longer (from 4 hours to 17 hours) could be due to the overhead of using exFAT. If possible, it may be a good idea to reformat the drive to ext4 for improved performance, especially when dealing with large data like your 400GB source folder.

Regarding the orange lights on your drives, this typically indicates a warning state, but it’s not always a critical error. The orange lights could have been triggered by high load or a temporary issue such as the system being overloaded during the backup process. It’s good that you’re monitoring the temperature and the status of the drives. Since the lights returned to green and everything seems to be operating normally now, it might just have been a temporary issue. However, I would suggest keeping an eye on the system and performing a S.M.A.R.T. test on your drives to ensure there’s no underlying hardware problem. Also, make sure your drives have the latest firmware to rule out any issues with the hardware itself.

If the issue with the orange lights persists, or if the backup continues to take unusually long, you might want to check the system’s logs for any warnings or errors related to the drives or the backup process itself.

[jumpinwired]

Ed, thanks so much for the reply.

I had more issues after my last post but before your reply. At one point, all 4 lights turned orange on my Nas. when I looked at the storage manager, it said critical on all 4 drives. A little while later, everything seemed to return to normal.

After I read your reply, I did end up reformatting the external hdd to ext4 again and re-linked the old backup file. Even though speeds were a little better after switching back to ext4, I still had similar issues. Multiple drives said critical at different times. Sadly again, my mistake, I forgot to deselect the movies folder associated with the applications backup. So my last backup was about 1.22tb which would be around 400GB if I had set it up right and it ended up corrupting the backup destination file. Thankfully by now with the first scare, I bought a 2TB external SSD and copied my backup files to it.

What surprised me is that the corrupted backup will not let me just delete the last version point. It says Restore Only and destination corrupted. I tried restarting the Nas to see if that will fix this issue and nothing changed. So I am going to have to delete the entire backup file and recopy the backup file from the new SSD. I'm like a week and a half working on this issue and I'm still not out of the woods yet.

For more disclosure, 2 of these drives are renewed enterprise seagate exos 12tb, but the other two are just a couple of old hard drive out some laptops or something. I did a couple of benchmark tests that I will talk about. I would upload a few pictures but this forum doesn't seem to host or support file uploading.

drive 1: toshiba MK8034GSX
read-30MB/s write-24MB/s

drive 2: seagate ST380815AS
read-71MB/s write-68MB/s

drive 3: seagate ST12000NM0538-2K2101
read-222MB/s write-224MB/s

drive 4: seagate ST12000NM0538-2K2101
read-214MB/s write-219MB/s

So is the toshiba so slow that it is a major bottle neck causing some of my problems? I still need to finish making sure to get a good backup so I haven't done the s.m.a.r.t. test yet but I will get to that soon.

At the end of the day, I don't care if my backup takes a long time or if my system is extra slow because of my hardware but I just don't want to risk corrupting my data of course.

Finally, I'm not sure about updating the firmware on these drives. I would be willing to do it but I think I will have to remove one drive at a time and plug them into my desktop right? I will need to follow a tutorial as this is just a bit over my head.

Thanks

[Junpinwired2]

Hello,

Ed or moderator, can you undo the ban on my first account please? Not sure why but it said I was banned for spam. Maybe when I posted my drive model numbers it triggered the system to automatically ban me. I don't know what I've done that is spamming but I'm definitely not trying to spam the forum.

Please and thanks.