Recovering Safepoint on a RAID My Book Live Duo doesn't work

[nairb]

I use my My Book Live Duo in RAID mode and created a safepoint to another external drive. After a power cut recently the Live Duo green led kept flashing with hard disks constantly running so I decided it was time to do a factory reset and do a recover. I did the factory reset, set up my RAID again and tried to restore the safepoint but then I got an error that it couldn't do the restore because the Live Duo needed to be factory fresh! Which it was apart from the fact that I put it back in RAID mode. I tried again doing the factory reset and do recover which it started doing but it looked to me like it was just copying the files back again...Bummer.

The moral of the story then is doing Safepoints with a RAID system is a pointless exercise.

[WDTony]

That is what a Safepoint does (or I am not clear on what your issue is). It has to be a "factory fresh" unit to restore to. All your configuration info and data will be restored to the MBL Duo. Did this not work?

[nairb]

The recover safepoint did start working when my live duo was in factory fresh state BUT it was only recovering my files, it did not restore my disks in RAID mode. If after doing the recover could I switch my setup to RAID (or would that wipe all my files?)

[WDTony · Accepted solution]

ah ok - Yes it does not do that.

You can change your RAID configuration without detroying your data - assuming you have enough room to change it. for example, if you have a 4TB drive and have less than 2TB of data when you are in Spanned Mode, you can convert to RAID 1 without any issues. If you have more than 2TB of data, you will need to remove some files to fit under 2TB - since RAID 1 is just a Mirror of one of the drives.

[nairb]

Thanks WDTony! I didn't realise I could put my drives back in RAID mode without affecting the data/files. Thats good to know!