Long story short, I wiped a drive I shouldn’t have and lost some data. Now I’m thinking of setting up a ‘cold storage’ array of sorts with the stack of spare 3.5" drives I have laying around. I’m thinking once a year backup
Is there an easy-ish way to backup a set of data that is spread across multiple drives without them all being mounted at once?
That’s essentially what I do. Bunch of drives, each formatted individually, then pooled with MergerFS. Get a new drive, add to the pool. If a drive fails, it only loses that much of my backup; rest of the disks are unaffected. All the advantages of storage pooling without the redundancy (which here is useful).