On 3/15/06, WA Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thats some of what I need to know. I have been working on the server backup. > I was wondering if the raid set up would do what I needed. What I am > thinking is that with Raid1, can I unplug one drive ,then plug in another > and use that as a backup disk? Will the Raid build the new drive that I put > in place? I have read a bunch about Raid but it dont answer these questions. > Or am I thinking wrong?
I think that you are thinking correctly, although it's not completely automatic First of all, you should get out of the habit of thinking as a disk in a raid array as a backup disk. It's really a redundant component which is used to improve availability. If you do something stupid like deleting an important file, it's going to be gone from both of the raid-1 disks, and unless you have a backup you won't be able to get it back. That said, if a drive in the raid-1 array fails, you need to use mdadm to replace it. The raid driver should notice that it's failed, If not you need to use "mdadm --fail" to mark it failed, then "mdadm --remove" to remove the failed drive from the array, and then "mdadm --add" to add the new drive to the array, at which time the raid driver will sync it to the existing good drive. I've not actually gone through having a drive fail, but when I converted to raid-1, I basically went through a very similar process. I first put a single new/unused drive into the raid-1 array, leaving an empty slot. I then copied the data from the old drive to the degraded array, and finally added the old drive to the array which synched it up. -- Rick DeNatale Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/ -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
