On 9/13/2010 7:32 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I backup (with BackupPC) onto a partition /BackupPC on machine A.
> I backup one directory on machine A, and another directory on machine B.
>
> I recently received a smartd warning about machine A:
> -----------------------------
> Device: /dev/sdb, 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
> -----------------------------
> This disk (sdb) is actually the drive on which I backup,
> though there are 7 partitions on the disk,
> and I don't know if the problem is in the /BackupPC partition.
> (I don't know how to determine with smartctl
> exactly where the problem is.)
>
> I have a large (1TB) USB external drive
> I would like to use to backup my BackupPC data,
> in case drive sdb actually packs up.
>
> I've looked quickly at the BackupPC documentation,
> in particular the section on archiving,
> but I am not entirely clear of the procedure,
> and would be very grateful for precise instructions.
>
> I'm also not entirely clear whether if I added
> a further internal drive /dev/sdc/ to my machine
> whether it would be relatively easy
> to transfer the BackupPC data from the USB disk to the new disk.


If you don't expect to need to restore from your old copies, the easiest 
thing would be to just add a new internal drive mounted wherever the old 
partition was and start over with new backups, keeping the old drive 
around just in case until you have sufficient new history on the new 
drive.  It may take a very long time to copy the old data and there's 
some chance it would fail during the copy anyway.  If there is anything 
particularly valuable in the old backups that doesn't still exist on the 
source directories, you could do a browser download, saving to the 
external drive.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com




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