Re: [gentoo-user] backup hardware setup

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 24/06/2014 16:43, meino.cramer@gmx.de wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I bought two identical external harddrives, USB 3.0, with 1 TByte each
> (no SSD - the good ole mechanical ones...;).
> 
> The intended use is for backup of longer files. The drives will
> contain the same contents.
> 
> Currently there are still "clean metal" (no partitioning, no fs).
> 
> Data integrity and recoverability (Uhhh...that words looks wrong...) in
> case of an desaster is more important than speed.
> 
> What is the recommended way of partitioning ?
> What filesystem to choose?
> 
> 
> Thank you very much in advance for any help!
> Best regards,
> mcc
> 
> 
> PS: Running vanilla kernel 3.15.1....

You haven't given much in the way of detail, so I assume you have
regular needs, nothing fancy, and it's all a bunch of files right?

In that case, partitioning and filesystem type are largely irrelevant as
long as you don't have corruption. With one caveat:

You must always make sure the source drive is intact and ok. If not, and
you back it up anyway, then you are already toast (you will overwrite
your last backup with new faulty data).

There's several approaches to how to do the transfer:

If you have say a general fileserver with lots of files that don't
change much or often, just rsync everything in one go. There is no
optimization you can do that will perform much faster than rsync.

If you have a big busy filesystem that changes often and lots, then use
lvm (or anything that can make snapshots) and rsync that.

If you have a huge database where everything is changing all the time,
don't do filesystem copies, use the tools provided by the db vendor. I
doubt this is your need as you would have said so, but it's worth
mentioning.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com