Bowie Bailey wrote:
>
>>> My filesystem is raid 1 (via md) with 3 disks.  Two of the disks are
>>> internal and one is in an sata hot-swap enclosure.  Whenever I want to
>>> take a backup offsite, I shut down the machine, pull the third drive,
>>> replace it with a new one, and start it back up.  Then I just need to
>>> tell md to rebuild onto the new drive and then take the old one
>>> offsite.  I always have at least two active drives in the raid, so I
>>> don't have to worry about a disk failure during the rebuild.
>>>     
>> You don't even have to shut down as long as your sata controller 
>> recognizes hot swaps.  Just stop backuppc, unmount the partition, and 
>> use mdadm to fail and remove the drive in the raid.  Then you can 
>> remount and restart backuppc.  I don't bring the old offsite copy back 
>> until the current one has been taken offsite, and it can be added to the 
>> raid at any time, using the mdadm --add command.  The re-sync does make 
>> the machine very busy for a  few hours so you'd want to do it at a time 
>> when backups aren't running.
>>   
> 
> I do the shutdown for two reasons:
> 
> 1) My system partition lives on the raid as well as the data, so I have
> to shut down to keep everything consistent.
> 2) My sata controller doesn't recognize hot swaps as far as I have been
> able to determine.

Try a 'dmesg' before and after inserting the drive.  If you see the 
drive detected, you should be able to start a sync without shutting 
down.  If you swap one out and in at the same time, you should have a 
third one in the offsite rotation so they aren't all in the same place 
at the same time.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com




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