[clue-tech] N00bish Question regarding drive duplication

[Red Mop]

On Friday 06 March 2009 01:55:55 am Mike Staver wrote:
> I've been in the development realm almost 100% over the last 3 years, so
> I'm getting insanely rusty with my linux skills.  Anyhow, I have a
> server at home where the age of the non-raid drives in it are concerning
> me. I think they are pushing 5 years now, and since this server isn't
> critical and I back it up, I'm not too worried about it.  However, I'd
> like to throw in a larger drive or two anyhow.  I use typical consumer
> Seagate OEM SATA drives in this machine, and I'm going to pick up a 1 TB
> drive over the weekend.  My n00b-like question is - what is the easiest
> way to simply "ghost" a mirror image of one of my old drives onto a new
> one? In the past I've used Norton Ghost to do this in the windows world
> with mixed success.  I know in the past with Linux I've just tar'd up a
> bunch of files and moved them.  Please tell me there is a more modern
> and easy way these days :) Maybe a dd script or something, I'm not sure.
> Thanks in advance for any tips you can provide to the rusty guy.
> _______________________________________________

There are several methods.

The LVM pvmove method lets you minimize downtime during the move by moving the 
filesystem from one drive to another live.  You can also resize live for some 
filesystems (ext3 I know does).  You can even move to a RAID configuration.

The tar-copy and rsync methods require you to take the server offline during 
the copy.    It has a benefit of defragging the drive.  You can also move to 
a RAID configuration.

The Clonezilla method works alot like Ghost.  I don't believe you can move to 
RAID.

The dd method takes a very long time, and does not resize the drive, you will 
have to do that in a separate step.  I am fairly certain you cannot move to 
RAID with this method.