David Nalley wrote: > Hi Matthew, > > I don't think the concern is so much that a client computer's drive and one > of > your backuppc box's drive would fail at the same instant, but rather what > the cost of one drive in the backuppc box's drive would be. > Loosing a single drive if you pool them all together with LVM means you loose > the entire logical volume, which means you have to start all backups over > again from scratch. That's too much of a waste of resources to me > (particularly if you are using rsync.) but that is just my perspective, it > may be perfectly acceptable in your environment, and is a decision you have > to make. > > If you go the RAID 1 option, I'd create two RAID 1 arrays and LVM them > together, or perhaps look at the RAID 10/0+1 option and put all 4 drives in > the same array. I still think that I would use LVM since it gives you some > flexibility in the future. Red Hat's new LVM guide is pretty decent, gives > lots of real world examples, you may want to check it out as well. > > a better raid and redundancy option is to software mirror a raid 5 volume over the 4 disks. That yields 1.4tb of storage. if you lose 1 drive the array still functions fine, you remove the faulty disk and replace it and rebuild, no data loss.
as pointed out above using just lvm across all 4 drives means if one disk fails the lvm crashes, data loss occurs. if you do 2 raid 1 mirrors you only get 1tb total storage. I'm not a big fan of extending lvm's across different physical disks, even if they are mirrored. You can still have lvm under the raid 5 array (make the raid array type physical volume) if you want, but it depends on your needs and it boils down to 2 questions: 1. do you want to easily resize partitions and create new ones in the 1.4tb raid array? and 2. do you want to do any sort of live snapshot backups? if you answer yes to either question, use lvm, if no to both then just do the software raid. Regards, Les ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
