Les Mikesell wrote at about 12:08:22 -0500 on Tuesday, April 26, 2011:
 > On 4/26/2011 11:38 AM, Michael Conner wrote:
 > > I installed BPC a few weeks ago and have been doing testing and setup 
 > > since then and have things working pretty well on several linux, windows, 
 > > and mac clients (ultimately there will be about 15 clients). The server is 
 > > a Dell 2400 with a 160gb ide drive, Centos 5.6, BPC 3.1 installed with yum 
 > > from the testing repos. I've added a sata controller and two 2t drives as 
 > > a raid 1 setup, which is what I'll use for real backups. I can't boot off 
 > > the sata drives, so I boot from the ide drive and put topdir on the satas.
 > >
 > > I've done some searching on offsite backups as I would like to maintain at 
 > > least a recent copy offsite as disaster protection. DD has been too slow 
 > > for these large drives (I would have to leave it going overnight with no 
 > > backups running). I may go with periodic archives using the BPC archive 
 > > function.
 > >
 > > However, another idea intrigued me that I saw in an earlier posting. 
 > > Someone used a RAID 1 setup but only put in the second disk periodically, 
 > > then removed it for offsite storage. I have three 2T drives, so was 
 > > considering something similar where I would keep a normal 2-disk RAID 1 
 > > setup but periodically remove one disk and replace it with a prior offsite 
 > > disk.
 > >
 > > Not being particularly experienced in all this, I was hoping someone on 
 > > the list could offer advice on whether this was a good ideal or not and 
 > > potential pitfalls.
 > 
 > It is working for me, but I use a 3-member RAID1 where 2 are always 
 > connected and the 3rd is rotated out periodically.  This isn't really 
 > necessary but when I was first trying it with one internal, one external 
 > drive the internal one failed, corrupting the attached external, and it 
 > was something of a hassle to rebuild from the remaining offsite external.

I did it that way where the 3rd 'backup' drive was mounted via USB and
had a *catastrophic* failure where something went wrong with the 3rd
drive causing all three RAID1 members to become corrupted. I'm not sure
exactly what but I ended up losing 2 years of backups.

I think a safer alternative would be to do what the OP proposes --
that way you always have one safe copy not part of the RAID in case
something messes up....

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