Posted by jamba on February 22, 2010
Backups can be very important, no one wants to lose any of their data–especially if it has happened to you before.
I have previously setup my x64 desktop PC with softRAID, so everything I have in my /home folder is mirrored across 2 drives. However, I am not sure if I am overly paranoid, or maybe I just like to be extra secure because now I have implemented an additional backup measure.
It started when I read some of this stuff about backups and solutions, so I decided I should probably do something similar. The one from distrowatch really pushed me a long though, as the Q&A thing really made sense.
To start off, I began by reading the ArchWiki backup tools page: wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Programs. I chose to try a few of them, I didn’t like arch-backup, backerupper didn’t really work the way I liked. A few more just didn’t work for me. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in linux | Tagged: arch, backup, data, linux, raid, rdup, rsync | 2 Comments »
Posted by jamba on February 3, 2010
Posted in linux | Tagged: linux, raid, viruses, wireless | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jamba on September 30, 2009
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Finally…I’ve gotten around to doing this. It has really taken a lot longer than it should have…but life is busy (I even went on vacation somewhere in there…AND stripped wallpaper/painted 2 rooms in the house. haha).
“Installing softRAID on Linux” is a more fitting title, at this point–being the Linux has been installed and working for quite a while, whereas the RAID has not.
I have changed my intended setup a few times during this journey, and have finally settled on leaving my /boot and /(root) partitions NON-raid, operating off of my /dev/sda drive. My home (which happens to be sda4) I have successfully converted to a dual disk raid 1 setup.
This document proved exceedingly helpful, I absolutely recommend it regardless of distribution. As everything was pretty much set up in my previous posts, all I did was add my entries to /etc/mdadm.conf using the command “mdadm -E –scan >> /etc/mdadm.conf” . After that, I did a rebuild of initcpio with this:
“[root ~]# mkinitcpio -g /boot/kernel26.img“. I also added my /dev/md2 into my fstab (along with the swap on the second drive).
With a reboot…everything worked magically. The only thing left for me to do was to reformat my single disk /home directory (sda4) to Linux raid auto detect (type “fd” using cfdisk), and then assemble the array. To do all this, I booted up from the Arch Linux live cd, changed the type of the partition, and then booted back into my normal setup. I was then able to run “mdadm -A /dev/md2 /dev/sda4” to add sda4 to the already running array md2. This started a rebuild of the array, syncing sda4 with sdb4. SUCCESS!
I am all done for now… maybe one day I’ll have the time to fiddle around with getting the root and boot partitions to work the same way…but until then, I am happy with what I’ve got. This was my end goal in the very beginning, anyway: to have a RAID backup for pictures and other important documents, which are stored in the /home directory.
Maybe someone will find this helpful, and save some time. It definitely did me good to take a break so I could observe some things I had done wrong (or incompletely).
Posted in linux | Tagged: linux, mdadm, raid | 1 Comment »
Posted by jamba on September 4, 2009
This is a continuation of Part 1.
After fiddling with Ubuntu and my RAID setup for a while, I got to thinking. After every upgrade I would run into this same issue, and would have to re-do the array create/build/assembly process while making sure the kernel was placed properly, as well as the initramfs.
So… combining that realization with my positive experience with Arch Linux, I decided to give up on Ubuntu and proceed forward using Arch. I have had no problems thus far with running Arch on my laptop, but on my desktop I will be much more focused on stability, rather than latest-and-greatest. Luckily for me, they just annouced a kernel26-lts not very long ago–this is a kernel that will stay supported for a longer period of time with no major changes. I will also put Gnome and Xorg on hold so they will not update automatically. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in linux | Tagged: arch, linux, raid, softraid, software, ubuntu | 3 Comments »