Forwarding this to the list because I accidentally took the thread private. -Rob
Rob Owens wrote: > Les, > > In the past you've talked about using software RAID 1 with hotplugable > drives. Have you tried it? Does it work well? And would it work > with USB drives? Yes, the way I am doing it is with a Linux software RAID1 created with 3 members with one specified as 'missing'. There are 2 internal drives that always stay in sync, and a pair of external drives that are rotated in weekly as the 3rd member, then when the sync is completed I briefly stop backuppc, unmount the partition, then fail and remove the external drive from the raid. This does work and I think it is reliable. You can leave it mounted while while the sync happens although it slows down a lot if a backup is running. I use dual interface firewire/USB external drives that normally take about 2 hours to sync a 250 gig partition over firewire, and can mount it via USB in my laptop for immediate restores. The server only has USB1.1, otherwise it would probably work to sync over USB instead. Originally I tried using only a single internal drive and keeping one of the external drives in the RAID all the time, but had problems with the Linux firewire drivers making the drive fail during backups. Switching to the sync-and-remove operation works around this issue. I also had an internal drive fail in this configuration which kept the sync from ever completing. I was able to recover (losing a week's backups) by moving the disk from the swapped-out external case to an internal position, but didn't want to have to repeat that so I added the 2nd internal full time RAID member. I have most of the parts in place to set up a new system with 750 gig drives in swappable SATA carriers but haven't decided yet whether to repeat the 3-member RAID1 or to try LVM on a 2-member RAID where the copy procedure would be to briefly unmount and make an LVM snapshot, then image-copy the snapshot to the drive that will be swapped. The result should be about the same either way, but I'm not sure about the speed of the copy. -- Les Mikesell [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
