On 11/9/17 2:01 AM, David Christensen wrote: > On 11/08/17 17:44, Bob Weber wrote: >> On 11/8/17 5:59 PM, David Christensen wrote: >>> I have read articles about building a RAID 1 with three drives, migrating in >>> data, pulling one drive and placing it off-site, operating in degraded mode >>> on >>> two drives, and then periodically re-installing the third drive, >>> resilvering, >>> pulling one drive and placing it off-site, and returning to degraded >>> operations on two drives. But STFW just now, I see a lot of posts with >>> titles >>> indicating this is a bad idea. > ... >>> But what I really want is some form of snapshot technology (rsync/hard link, >>> LVM, btrfs, ZFS) with all the goodies -- realtime compression, realtime >>> de-duplication, and encryption. I need a more powerful backup server (many >>> core processor with AES-NI, 16+ GB RAM, SSD caches, etc.). > >> I have used raid 1 to make a drive I can take off site for backup. You just >> grow the raid 1 array by one disk and add the disk you want to take out >> (even on >> a usb/sata connection ... but slow). Of course the disk or partition(s) >> need >> to be the same size as the array. Let it sync and then boot to a live cd and >> you can fail and remove that drive. Or just power down and remove the >> drive. >> That way the embedded file system will be unmounted correctly. I have then >> taken that one drive and connected it to another system and been able to run >> the >> raid 1 in degraded mode and mount the embedded file system(s) to get to the >> files. To make the original raid happy just grow the array again setting the >> number of drives back to what it was originally (you can grow to a smaller >> number). The syncing can be slow since every byte on the drive needs to be >> "synced" instead of just the space the files take up. > > Okay. What RAID technology were you using -- LVM, mdadm, btrfs, ZFS, other? > I use software raid with mdadm. Its pretty forgiving with powering down and removing a drive (after sync) and growing the array back down to the original size. I mainly do this on my backup server running backuppc. The files are compressed and hard linked between backups if they have not changed. This makes any other type of offsite backup pretty hard ... rsync just ran out of memory. So adding a drive to the raid 1 and syncing is easy in comparison. Having grub make the drive bootable (since the os is also on a raid 1 partition) makes the drive very easy to just install in new hardware and get going again (assuming the original backup system was destroyed).
-- *...Bob*
