hansbkk AT gmail DOT com wrote at about 17:19:09 +0700 on Sunday, April 10, 
2011:
 > 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.

The only problem with dd is that you would generally need to either
make a "snapshot" (e.g., using lvm2) or shutdown BackupPC and unmount
the drives to assure a perfect partition copy.

I'm not sure though how a 'dd' of an lvm2 snapshot works and what you
would need to do on the new drive to get it to mount.

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