I’m considering buying a Spare Drive for my G-Safe. What is the best way to use it?

A: Good question. A spare drive is useful to have in case of an emergency. (Even the best drives go bad.) It’s also a good way to create an off-site backup. More on that later. Right now, let’s assume the G-Safe alarm has sounded, alerting you that one of your drives has failed.

Step 1: Mute that pesky alarm.
The mute button is located on the front of G-Safe unit, right below the status LED.

Step 2: Identify the injured drive.
Your LCD panel will tell you which drive failed.

Also, a blue LED will light up on the failed drive. Be careful not to remove the wrong drive; the results could be catastrophic.

Step 3: Remove the failed drive.
Use the special “key” you received with your G-Safe to unlock the drive and gently remove the module.

Step 4: Insert the new drive.
The G-Safe will now ask you (via the LCD screen) whether you want to rebuild the new drive. Press the “ENT” button to begin the process. (It’s just left of the mute button.) Or to cancel, press the “ESC” button (that one is to the left of the status LED).

Step 5: Wait.
The G-Safe is now rebuilding the new drive. This will take a very, very long time: anywhere from 8 to 12 hours (or longer) for a 2TB unit. You’ll know the rebuild is complete when you see this message:

Because the G-Safe can rebuild your data when a drive is replaced, you can add a layer of protection by storing a copy of your drive offsite. By rotating the drives regularly, you’ll always have a copy of your data.

To create your offsite copy:

Step 1: Unmount your G-Safe from your computer and turn it off.
For Mac, you just drag the G-Safe icon to the trash located in the dock, and you’re ready to power down. For PC, you’ll need to right click on the “eject” icon (bottom of your monitor, near the clock). You’ll get a popup message that reads “Safely Remove Hardware,” click on the box. You’ll get another popup window that shows your hardware devices. Make sure the G-Safe drive is highlighted and click on the “stop” button. Now, you can turn off the power.

Step 2: Remove the one of the drives and turn the unit back on.
An alarm will sound and the G-Safe’s LCD display will tell you that one drive is OK and the other drive is missing.

Press the mute button.

Step 3: With the G-Safe still on, insert the new drive into the unit.
The LCD screen will ask you if you want to rebuild the drive you just inserted. Press the “ENT” button and wait for the drive to rebuild the data onto the new drive. Once this is finished you can safely transport the drive you removed to an offsite location.

Remember, although the G-Safe is an extremely reliable RAID-1 solution, providing mirrored, redundant working storage of your data, like any hard drive, given the right circumstances, it can fail and data could be lost. This is why needs to be backed up to a stable archival media such as LTO or Blu-ray. Your Polyline sales rep can explain more about the archival media options available to you.