brickheadbs
March 27th, 2007, 08:40 AM
I've been searching around for ways to reliably backup a partition to a second HDD and came up with an idea, but I can't figure out if it's possible or already exists.
I've found interesting info about Software RAID via Linux (I also found something about Windows Server 2003 doing this??). If I understand correctly, it doesn't require any hardware support.
If that is true, is there any reason you can't create RAID stripes/mirrors over partitions only. What I would like to do is have a RAID 1 style partition to protect data (the usual photos, documents, etc.) and a RAID 0 style partition to speed some things up, both on the same pair of drives. I'm just running a basic PC, not a server, so hot swapping and uptime aren't priorities. I know you couldn't boot from these "RAID partitions", but if it worked you could crash a hard drive, reinstall to your good one if it's not already the one you're booting from, and just make sure not to reformat that mirrored partition. You'd loose your RAID 0, but that's what zero is all about.
RISKS: Of course, you could obviously run the risk of formatting over your mirrored partition accidentally and still loosing your data (totally different subject, if you did format in Linux, can you recover any data? I (being the smart person I am I formatted the wrong drive under windows and still was able to recover with a data recovery program.) This would not be as safe as a real RAID 1, but it's way better than no backup (I've crashed 2 drives over the past 5 years)..
Still, it would be cool. File backup is a hot issue in that so few people do it. I suck at it. I've not found a backup program that I find easy to use and really works (recovery is dumb for most of them). I have found some automated backup programs searching with Synaptic package manager. If they are easy, they'll work OK. But RAID style would be way cooler.
Added to UBUNTU I would like to see super easy backup (that's easy to recover) and my RAID idea. If UBUNTU could do this relatively simply it would take one more step closer to blowing the big OS's out of the water.
I've found interesting info about Software RAID via Linux (I also found something about Windows Server 2003 doing this??). If I understand correctly, it doesn't require any hardware support.
If that is true, is there any reason you can't create RAID stripes/mirrors over partitions only. What I would like to do is have a RAID 1 style partition to protect data (the usual photos, documents, etc.) and a RAID 0 style partition to speed some things up, both on the same pair of drives. I'm just running a basic PC, not a server, so hot swapping and uptime aren't priorities. I know you couldn't boot from these "RAID partitions", but if it worked you could crash a hard drive, reinstall to your good one if it's not already the one you're booting from, and just make sure not to reformat that mirrored partition. You'd loose your RAID 0, but that's what zero is all about.
RISKS: Of course, you could obviously run the risk of formatting over your mirrored partition accidentally and still loosing your data (totally different subject, if you did format in Linux, can you recover any data? I (being the smart person I am I formatted the wrong drive under windows and still was able to recover with a data recovery program.) This would not be as safe as a real RAID 1, but it's way better than no backup (I've crashed 2 drives over the past 5 years)..
Still, it would be cool. File backup is a hot issue in that so few people do it. I suck at it. I've not found a backup program that I find easy to use and really works (recovery is dumb for most of them). I have found some automated backup programs searching with Synaptic package manager. If they are easy, they'll work OK. But RAID style would be way cooler.
Added to UBUNTU I would like to see super easy backup (that's easy to recover) and my RAID idea. If UBUNTU could do this relatively simply it would take one more step closer to blowing the big OS's out of the water.