[linux-audio-user] Reliable archival of recordings

Anthony DiSante orders at nodivisions.com
Sun Dec 21 00:40:20 EST 2003


Jack O'Quin wrote:
> Anthony DiSante <orders at nodivisions.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>I have a pair of 120GB drives in my system, and a single 250GB drive
>>as backup (Western Digital with 8MB cache and 3-year warranty, just
>>bought at thenerds.net for $233US).  The backup drive is in an
>>external USB2/Firewire enclosure, and I connect it once a week (twice
>>if I'm feeling paranoid that week) to do the backup:
>>
>>
>>rsync -av --delete --exclude '/mnt/backup/' / /mnt/backup/
>>
>>So /mnt/backup/ is then an exact copy of /, and the best part is, it's
>>bootable and functions just like the original drive(s) if I stick it
>>on the motherboard.  And the backup process usually takes just about a
>>half an hour, depending on how much new data I've added, of course.
> 
> 
> Are you sure it's really bootable?  Maybe you should try it.  

Well, ok, I neglected to mention that when I first bought the disk and did 
the first rsync, I booted from a slackware CD and ran lilo on the disk one 
time.  After that, it's bootable.

> I doubt that the MBR, /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf are correct for a
> single-disk configuration.  These should be easy to fix as part of the
> recovery process, but you're going to need to boot a rescue disk first
> and reconfigure for the new hard disk.

Yes, I would have to change one mount point in fstab.  Fooey on you!  But in 
terms of OS+data, it's an exact mirror that functions properly, which is 
really sweet, especially from a single command.

> This is still a good method.  How do you partition the backup disk?
> One big filesystem?

Yep, one big one.  Standard ext3 except that I tune2fs-ed it, to reduce the 
reserved blocks percentage from 5 (the default) to 2, which gains me about 7 
gigs (on a "249GB" partition, originally df reported 222GB usable, and after 
tune2fs-ing it, there's 229GB usable).

-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/



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