[PLUG] Building Ubuntu System With Mirrored Drives

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 8:18 PM, Chaz Sliger <chaz at bctonline.com> wrote:
> Chris,  Thanks for the heads-up on hardware raid.
> I did some poking around and will definitely go with software raid.
> The whole idea behind the 3rd disk is disaster recovery.  Since you can
> periodically swap one of the raid-1 drives in the system with the drive on
> the shelf, it gives you the ability to recovery quickly to a point in time.

A reasonable goal which I solve with rsnapshot =)

> Q: Have you been able to recover using your rsnapshot data on the usb drive?

I've never tried a full recovery (I use it to recover old
versions/deleted files primarily), but since it is (several) full
copies of the filesystem, a simple "cp -Rp" or rsync would do the
trick.  To be clear, I can at this second browse (or fully recover) my
"big data" partition as it looked at the following times:

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 21 13:04 monthly.2
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug  4 13:05 monthly.1
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep  1 13:04 monthly.0
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 15 13:04 weekly.9
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 22 13:05 weekly.8
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 29 13:05 weekly.7
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct  6 13:05 weekly.6
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 17 13:09 weekly.5
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov  3 13:02 weekly.4
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 10 13:02 weekly.3
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 17 13:02 weekly.2
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 24 13:01 weekly.1
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  1 13:08 weekly.0
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  6 13:04 daily.6
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  7 13:05 daily.5
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  8 13:03 daily.4
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  9 13:04 daily.3
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 10 13:05 daily.2
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 11 13:04 daily.1
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 12 13:04 daily.0

It's not a drive image or anything, so you need to reinstall OS upon
drive failure if the drive held your / partition as well before
recovering...but those snapshots are fully portable to other
machines/architectures on the upside.