RAID gotchas!

[Roberto Ragusa]

Jeffrey Ross wrote:

> Now comes the fun part, you need to move your data to the new
> partition.  Although I've read where you can shrink the partition and
> convert to a raid volume, I decided against that.
> 
> I used dump/restore using the command:
> 
> dump -0 -b 1024 -f - /dev/sdaX | restore -rf -

I've tried the shrink method in the past without problems (I think
you have read my own description of the needed steps).
In other cases, I just copied the files (you get a free defrag too).
I'd trust cp, "tar c|tar x", rsync (all with powerful
"copy everything" options), but I would be a little worried
about dump/restore (in any case I usually work on reiserfs,
so dump/restore is not an option).

Dump is considered a bad choice by Linus himself; read this:

  http://lwn.net/2001/0503/a/lt-dump.php3

(a few years ago, but the words are quite strong)

Best regards.
-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it