On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 12:16 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com> 
wrote:
> I've never heard of raid sync affecting the original disk(s).  I've been doing
> it for years, first with a set of firewire external drives (which also had USB
> but it was slower), then the sata bays.  There might be problems in adding 
> more
> members than originally created in the set, though.  In your situation I would
<snip>

 FYI for all, not doubting Les' good experience doing this  (using
mdraid mirroring as a user-land tool to mirror a partition to an
external drive for offsite backup rotation):

I had a pretty extensive discussion with the Linux-RAID list on
thisand the general conclution was that the way mdraid does the
mirroring would just add unnecessary kruft to the resulting filesystem
and make recovery more difficult.

The bottom line from them was that rather than using RAID to do the
mirroring to a removable drive, better to just use a tool like DD.
When I expressed that I wanted a bit more assurance of a "bit-perfect"
mirror being done, and was directed to these enhanced versions:

http://dc3dd.sourceforge.net/
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Dc3dd

Of course there are many COTS "partition cloning" tools out there as
well if that's a better fit for a given situation.

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