Michael,
I've never used software (or hardware) RAID before either. I took at look
at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO to see
what the answer might be. It kind of looks like this may not meet your
requirement of being able to just boot from the backup drive. It looks like
the definitions are made at the partition/file system level, not a device
level. It _may_ be possible to specify at the device level, but that would
take some testing to determine.
One further comment about your scheme. If you've been talking about using
the -u parameter of tar, ignore what follows. Running diff against your
entire hard drive to determine what to back up probably isn't the best way
to go. There are other methods to do the equivalent of an incremental
backup. The tar command has a couple of different possibilities:
-u, --update
only append files that are newer than copy in archive
-N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE
only store files newer than DATE
I'm not sure just what this tar option means, but it sounds interesting:
-g, --listed-incremental F
create/list/extract new GNU-format incremental backup
Mark Post
-----Original Message-----
From: Coffin Michael C [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 8:47 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Cloning i386 Hard Drives - Like DDR
Hi Mark,
If I were to decide to go RAID1, would there be anything about either of the
drives in a RAID1 configuration that would prevent their being swappable?
I've never set up RAID1 before, but maybe it would be worth looking at - and
then I could do logical backups (diff/tar) right on the primary/hda drive
(which would also be RAIDed to the secondary/hdc drive anyhow). I've got
tons of space at the moment so this might make sense for me.
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: Post, Mark K [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 8:18 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Cloning i386 Hard Drives - Like DDR
Which is exactly what Michael asked for, and what he'll get with using "dd."
I tend to agree that a software RAID will probably serve Michael better than
running "dd" every night.
Mark Post
-----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
