in-situ conversion to FT disk config?

[John Abreau]

Michael ODonnell wrote:

> Well, I recently got that Cosmic Wakeup Call that
> everybody eventually gets - a disk on another machine
> (fortunately not totally mission critical!)  failed -
> so I'm freshly motivated to finally follow through
> on my FT plan.  Meanwhile, though, I've accumulated
> a fair collection of data on hda while hdc is still
> effectively blank, so I wonder if there's some way to
> perform an on-the-fly conversion from my vulnerable
> single disk config to an FT config that brings that
> second disk (hdc) into play without me needing to make
> substantial changes to hda.

No, that won't work; when you set up RAID or LVM on the disks, you'll 
lose all the data on the disks.

In any case, disks are cheap; CompUSA sells a 300 GB IDE disk for $199, 
and a USB2 enclosure for around $40; no doubt you could find the saem 
things online even cheaper. If you have less than 300 GB on hda, then 
for $240 or less, you can back it all up, build your RAID set, and then 
load the data back onto the RAID set.

After that, well, RAID protects you from a hardware failure; it's not a 
replacement for backups. Assuming the size of yuor RAID volume will be 
less than 300 GB, you could then dedicate the new USB drive for use as a 
backup drive; rsync the RAID volume onto it periodically, amd optionally 
maintain periodic snapshots. I've got a couple of my home machines doing 
this hourly, and keeping hourly snapshots for 8 hours and nightly 
snapshots for 14 days.

-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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