[clue-tech] N00bish Question regarding drive duplication

[mike havlicek]

--- On Fri, 3/6/09, Red Mop <redmop924 at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Red Mop <redmop924 at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: [clue-tech] N00bish Question regarding drive duplication
> To: "CLUE technical discussion" <clue-tech at cluedenver.org>
> Date: Friday, March 6, 2009, 8:02 PM
> 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.

Why not setup lvm logical partitions on the new drive for all but the boot, and use software raid 1 to do the copy?

-Mike

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