Jack O'Quin wrote: > Anthony DiSante <orders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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/
