Again, thanks for all of the great suggestions and info. What I have is two 120Gig EIDE hard drives:
/dev/hda Primary boot drive /dev/hdc Backup drive Both drives are mounted in cold-swappable removable racks. What I would like to do is use hdc as a backup medium for hda. On Sunday I'll run a full clone of hda to hdc (probably using dd, and probably in single user mode). Then on Monday-Saturday I'll use a diff / tar approach to zip up and copy over incremental changes into a /backup directory on hdc. This will give me a 7 day backup scheme that should allow me to swap drives in the event of a total failure and just boot off of the backup drive (mounted in the hda chasis), and also allow me to recover grom "logical errors" by just copying files from hdc to hda if necessary. It should be a lot faster/cheaper than using tapes, and if I decide I want more than a 7 day retention I can just swap hdc's every week (a 120Gig Western Digital ATA100 7200 RPM drive with 8Meg cache is only $171.00 at AVLogic.com - they're terrific!). By the way, the lockable removable racks with power/IDE activity lights are only $12 at AVLogic.com and work great if anyone is interested. Again, thanks for all of the advice and info - it is much appreciated. :) Michael Coffin, VM Systems Programmer Internal Revenue Service - Room 6527 1111 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20224 Voice: (202) 927-4188 FAX: (202) 622-3123 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Ledbetter, Scott E [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 7:45 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Cloning i386 Hard Drives - Like DDR RAID1 protects against physical disk disaster, but not logical problems. For example, if your database is corrupted, with a RAID1 scheme it is corrupted on both copies. Scott Ledbetter StorageTek -----Original Message----- From: John Summerfield [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: August 14, 2002 8:51 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Cloning i386 Hard Drives - Like DDR On Thu, 15 Aug 2002 04:58, you wrote: > Aaah, good - that's what I thought you meant. Yes, of course it would > be best to shutdown the system before cloning the disk, but what I > intend to do is just backup my running system to a spare hard drive > (of identical size and geometry) in the middle of the night via a cron > job. So worse case, it should be the same as recovering from a sudden > power-off (which shouldn't be too bad). I may shutdown sendmail, > imap, httpd and a few others guys before doing the backup since they > should be the only things (of any importance) that might update > important files. Why not just implement RAID1? -- Cheers John Summerfield Microsoft's most solid OS: http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/
