The one thing that I find difficult to do which is very time-consuming is that I like to have a backup of the important files. However, they're so big. I haven't really found documentation that explains how to back up quickly well enough. I want to know: how I can connect a hard drive directly to FreeNAS, and then basically copy one of the shares, either a Window share or Linux share, to that hard drive. To do it over the local area network is very slow and very often, due to the fact that it takes so long, things will get interrupted. Either the router will reset or something will happen, and then it gets confusing as to how to get it restarted and get it going again once the connections are re-established. Therefore, being able to do a direct backup of the shares to an external hard drive is something that I would like. Or, if it could be done easily and more quickly over the internet, I'd like to find the documentation that would tell me how to do that. So far, I haven't really found anything that has worked that well. One of my hard drives has failed and the documentation that I've been able to find has not helped. I know I've replaced drives before, however, I haven't been able to find the right documentation to get it done this time, and now I'm sitting here with a degraded system. I can still lose one more drive and not lose any data, however, I don't like sitting like that. I've got a brand new drive in there, and yet I haven't been able to replace the faulty one that is now in the recycling bin somewhere. That's why I need some documentation for backing up to just an ordinary hard drive. Right now I just find the documentation that is available lacking or confusing. Scaling the solution is expensive.