Hard Drive woes

My home server consists of a 12 TB array drive, an 8 TB clone of the essential data from the array and an 8 TB media drive.  None of which iS currently backed up to my satisfaction.

My backup array is a mix of 2 x 2TB external USB drives, 1 x 1TB external USB drive, 1 x 1TB internal drive, and 2 x 4TB internal drives.  The whole system is on an old Mac Pro Tower.  One of the 2 TB drives is bad.

Hours to isolate and pull it from the drive crate, hours to figure out how to force format from Terminal.  ( fdisk -i MBR drivename). Force all drives to format for Windows ( this fixes weird drive issues on the mac) and then reformat as Mac drives. All of this to test the newly returned AppleRAID tool.

Not only is the 2TB drive bad, but neither of the 4TB drives wants to join the raid or even format properly. Aaaaargh!!!

Midnight came and its time to pumpkin.  I’ll update this post as soon as I get this solved. Hopefully without having to purchase new drives.

******

Update 3/4/19

So all drives are now 8TB ( There are 4) and all have a clone as a mirror image for backup. STILL not totally satisfactory, but if one drive dies I replace it and clone it again.  Next upgrade will be to put these 4 in a NAS Array and get a second for onsite backup and a third for offsite. THEN I’ll be much happier about backups.  And before anyone asks or comments.  64tb for a home server is a bit ridiculous.  

• Media Drive – Movies, TV & Music
• Server Drive- Collected programs, information, fonts, design resources, 3d models, etc
• Big Data – Business files, more general files, the latest downloads to sort and organize, etc.
• Library – Ebooks, Comic files, and Audio Books