Raid one

[Karl Larsen]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Karl Larsen wrote:
>
>>> RAID is generally used because of a need, rather than simply because 
>>> you
>>> can do it.  Of course, if you're doing this as a learning exercise,
>>> that's another matter.
>>>
>>> Some benefits of RAID, depending on the type, *can* be faster access to
>>> data spread over more than one drive (though your current system might
>>> be more than fast enough, making this pointless), or having a spare
>>> drive that *can* let you keep on working when one drive has failed
>>> (mirroring - useful for servers, probably less important for stand 
>>> alone
>>> client machines in the home), or increased storage space by using an
>>> array of drives as if they were one big one (which can also be done
>>> using LVM).
>>>
>>>   
>>    No my need is to have a backup in case this hard drive quits 
>> working. I can do this with rsync. But I am getting the data needed 
>> to make a raid-1 and it would be fun to make one just for the 
>> experience :-)
>
> Disk failure is the most likely thing to go wrong, just not the only 
> thing so you still need some other kind of backups.  Raid has the 
> advantage that you can recover more quickly if you go down at all (IDE 
> drive failures often hang the computer until you remove them) and you 
> don't lose the data past the last backup run.  Disks are pretty cheap 
> these days and they fail unpredictably about like light bulbs.  If you 
> want to make things slightly easier, set up a machine with 3 or 4 
> disks and don't bother with raid on the system portion which you can 
> easily re-install.  Just add a pair of drives with one big parition in 
> a raid1 configuration and move your /home to it - or set it up that 
> way during the install.  Then you just have to save or remember any 
> special configurations in /etc and keep your important work under /home.
>
    I see the white knuckles part is where your trying to copy, for 
example /usr/ from the working f7 to the raid-1 partition for /usr/. It 
seems that you can drop clear back to a basic window with Ctrl-Alt-F1 
and use after logging in as root, # cp -at /usr /dev/md6. This should 
work fine :-)

    Still it is a worry. But I see how to do it. Now to write it down :-D



-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.