Disk Mirroring

[Mike Noble]

Yang Xiao wrote:
> Hi,
> I built a  FC2 box with a single drive on a DELL 1550, now I want to
> add another drive and mirror the first drive using LVM, is this
> possible? If it is, how should I go about doing it?
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Yang
> 
Yang,

Just add the second disk, you can mount it as /mnt/backup.  Then use
rsync to copy the needed files directories to the new disk.  As an
example we will say that you want to backup(rsync) the home
directories:

rsync -a --delete /home /mnt/backup

This will make a copy of /home to /mnt/backup/home,  The -a tells
rsync to do an archive (keeping all permissions and dates the same),
--delete tells it that if a file has been deleted from the source that
the file/directory should be removed from the destination.  This
will allow you to add this to a cron job so that it runs on a regular
basis.
I have this setup and run it on a daily basis.  If you feel that
you need more backups, you can run it every hour.   The rsync
man page gives some really good examples.  This also works really
well if you delete a file by mistake, you can retrieve it from the
backup directory (as long as you have not done an rsync between the
time of deletion and the time of retrieval).

Mike