[ale] RAID, IDE and/or Linux

[David Corbin]

James P. Kinney III wrote:

>Since you're not interested in speed, but in reliability, look at
>software raid and a raid 1 mirroring arrangement. Writes will happen at
>about the same the same speed as a normal write to a single hard drive,
>but reads can happen a bit faster.
>
>If one drive dies, you (root) get alerted. When the bad drive is
>replaced, the software automatically mirrors the data onto the
>replacement drive.
>
>If this is to be a long-term archival of stuff to be never deleted, look
>into setting the append only bit to the drive partition. That will add a
>lock that prevents unintended deletions.
>
I'm not sure I would want to say that no files will be deleted.  Various 
softare packages will be accessing this system, and I don't know that 
they will never delete stuff.

>
>For "third drive" capability, make one of the mirror drives a pullout,
>caddy-style and have two drives for the slot. Unmount the mirrored
>partition, pull the drive and swap in the backup drive. Restarting the
>mirroring software will bring the 3rd drive in sync with the first.
>
>For off-site storage, you could look an rsync solution to keep a remote
>drive in sync with the the raid system. This can be run from cron.
>
duh! Given that I do this for other stuff, you'd think I would have 
though of rsync myself.  Is there anyway to encrypt the rsync-ed data 
(using rsync) on the remote system?  I know it could be done with a 
loopback device, or something, but I'm not sure I want to do that.

>
>On Sat, 2002-02-16 at 10:21, David Corbin wrote:
>
>>I'm contemplating setting up a "big file server" to act as storage for 
>>all my "personal critical data".  This will include source control for 
>>home projects, digital pictures, ripped CDs, digitized audio, and 
>>perhaps even some video eventually - other stuff too, I'm sure.. 
>> Naturally, the server will run Linux. Because of the great volume of 
>>data that will not be replaceable, I'm contemplating a RAID solution. 
>> This is for "backup and reliability", rather than for "speed".  I am 
>>not so silly to think that this server will survive the rest of my life 
>>as is, however it is my intent that this be a place to be data I wish to 
>>keep the rest of my life.   However, I don't want to spend "lots" of 
>>time administrating it, or doing maintenance every week.
>>
>>The question for you folks is, what experiences do you have with Linux 
>>doing RAID, or an IDE RAID controller that I can benefit from?
>>
>>One thing I'm concerned about, is what happens when 2 years down the 
>>road, one drive fails-  First, do I find out about this failure 
>>immediately.  Second, what if I can't find an exact replacement for the 
>>dead drive.  
>>
>>There is an implied issue here.  If this data is that important to me, 
>>I'll want to periodically make a copy for offsite.  To me, the best way 
>>to do that these days is on another drive.  Is there a viable RAID 
>>solution that will let me do this?  Can I have "3 equal drives", one of 
>>which is only there occaisionally?
>>
>>Thoughts and comments please.
>>
>>David Corbin
>>
>>
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