On Tuesday 28 October 2003 06:37, Luke Rosenthal wrote: > On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, maarten van den Berg wrote: > > One of the cheapest "backup" mediums right now are harddisks themselves > > (weird, isn't it?) so it stands to reason some people try to build > > something that is foolproof (at least against hardware failure) using > > that, just disks. > > Ok, most folks would argue that hard disk failure is a byproduct of them > being run continuously. Especially in the case of IDE disks, which are > usually cheaper than their SCSI counterparts on a cost-per-MB ratio, but > consequently have a much shorter MTBF. > > So here's my question - would it be possible to use a very large IDE disk > in a system purely for backups, eg one of those new 300GB behemoths - but > with one caveat - leave it "asleep". Ie. leave it "spun down", and only > activate it once a day at backup time, run the backup, verify it, then > unmount it, and put it to sleep in a cron job. Feasible? I think that would be o.k. The system normally deals good with spun down disks. > I know there's the appropriate commands to do it, but are they risky? If > a drive's not mounted, but powered off, it should present no problems or > lock up the OS, correct? No, many laptop users are spinning down they root disk, so I don't think there are problems. > Everyone's got a horror story.. :) and most people learn from it :) Some more thoughts to the backup problem: - When a system gets very reliable (with RAID etc.) the possibility that a user does a "rm *" gets more likely than a hardware/software failure. - Most users only have very little data that's worth backing up. When looking at myself, there is not much more than 300MB of data and this is compressable to ~ 150MB. But my homedir is filled up with a *lot* of junk that sums up to ~ 2GB. One possibility to deal with this is that the user denotes the directories he wants to backup in a text file (or maybe web interface). Best Regards, Hermann -- x1@aon.at GPG key ID: 299893C7 (on keyservers) FP: 0124 2584 8809 EF2A DBF9 4902 64B4 D16B 2998 93C7 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
