Disk Mirroring

[Yang Xiao]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 09:19:39 -0700, Guy Fraser <guy at incentre.net> wrote:
> You might want to look at "rsync".
> 
> We use RAID 1 mirroring on a number of servers and then use rsync to
> back them up to an archive server using a second NIC on each machine.
> We then back up the archive server using rsync to 300GB external
> firewire drives {takes less than 3 hours}, then circulate them off site.
> 
> You might want to get a couple of new drives, setup the miroring on the
> new drives then rsync the data to the new partitions and update the
> fstab, grub/lilo ...etc... files accordingly, then swap the order of the
> drives
> to boot from the mirrored set. You could then use the old drive for
> backing up the mirror.
> 
> We used to use tape libraries, and SCSI RAID on all our servers, but
> now we only have couple dual Xeon monsters that need SCSI RAID.
> As a matter of fact we now have a double wide server case we don't
> need that has dual 450W power supplies and supports over 18 5.25"
> drives and 14 fans {Very Noisy}.
> 
> We have a couple of new machines with SATA that seem to be
> performing quite well, only time will tell.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Thomas Cameron wrote:
> 
> >On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 21:03 -0500, Yang Xiao wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >>ha, I want to do a RAID 1, mirror the first drive for failover support.
> >>Thanks,
> >>Yang
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >I do not think you can do that non-destructively, as you have to
> >redefine your partition types on the existing drive...  Have a look at
> >these sites:
> >
> >http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-adv/raid.htm
> >http://willert.dk/geek/raid.html
> >http://www.md.pp.ru/articles/linuxraid.html
> >http://togami.com/~warren/guides/remoteraidcrazies/
> >
> >Thomas
> >
> >
> >
> 
> -- 
> Guy Fraser

So basically there's no way to build a RAID 1 without having to
rebuild the system?
I know one option is to rsync the files somewhere first then move then
back later, but that still requires a rebuild.

Yang