Disk Mirroring

[Guy Fraser]

You might want to look at "rsync".

We use RAID 1 mirroring on a number of servers and then use rsync to
back them up to an archive server using a second NIC on each machine.
We then back up the archive server using rsync to 300GB external
firewire drives {takes less than 3 hours}, then circulate them off site.

You might want to get a couple of new drives, setup the miroring on the
new drives then rsync the data to the new partitions and update the
fstab, grub/lilo ...etc... files accordingly, then swap the order of the 
drives
to boot from the mirrored set. You could then use the old drive for
backing up the mirror.

We used to use tape libraries, and SCSI RAID on all our servers, but
now we only have couple dual Xeon monsters that need SCSI RAID.
As a matter of fact we now have a double wide server case we don't
need that has dual 450W power supplies and supports over 18 5.25"
drives and 14 fans {Very Noisy}.

We have a couple of new machines with SATA that seem to be
performing quite well, only time will tell.



Thomas Cameron wrote:

>On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 21:03 -0500, Yang Xiao wrote:
>
>  
>
>>ha, I want to do a RAID 1, mirror the first drive for failover support.
>>Thanks,
>>Yang
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I do not think you can do that non-destructively, as you have to
>redefine your partition types on the existing drive...  Have a look at
>these sites:
>
>http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-adv/raid.htm
>http://willert.dk/geek/raid.html
>http://www.md.pp.ru/articles/linuxraid.html
>http://togami.com/~warren/guides/remoteraidcrazies/
>
>Thomas
>
>  
>

-- 
Guy Fraser