Software Raid 5 (FC5)

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 10:18 -0600, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> Gilboa Davara wrote:
> > On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 20:38 -0600, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> >>
> >> Using LVM to create a single virtual device out of the md devices may
> >> make sense, *if* you trust pvmove, which the LVM HOWTO claims doesn't
> >> work.
> > 
> > I *don't*. When I add drives to a RAID5 array, I back-up -everything-,
> > delete -everything- and rebuild the array from scratch.
> > Doing work on RAID live array (with no backup), -even- if you are
> > working on another partition is a big no-no in my book. Single
> > mistake... single twisted IDE/SCSI/SATA cable tends to be a career
> > altering mistake ;) 
> > 
> 
> As I've learned to my sorrow, no amount of RAID will protect you against
> a misplaced 'rm -rf'.
> 
> I would love to have a *real* backup of my music collection.
> Unfortunately, by "real" I mean some sort of relatively stable media
> that can be put in a safe deposit box or something -- i.e. a USB disk
> drive is out.  To the extent that I've looked, tape solutions are just
> too damn expensive.
----
RAID is disaster protection - as in hard drive failure (excepting RAID 0
which has no redundancy and no fault tolerance)

Backup to another filesystem whether on tape/external drive/network
filesystem/locally stored copies provides a different level of
protection.

Both fault tolerance (RAID) and file backup are essential for important
stuff as they solve different problems.

And who among us hasn't done 
rm -rf /some/path/that/they/regretted/at/some/point

And as a child, I'm quite certain I stuck my hand in the flame even
though my parents warned me about that.

;-)

Craig