Short summary:
Although there are RAID controllers that make hot-swapping SCSI drives
seem simple, I was wondering if anyone has found a safe way to hot-swap
single IDE drives without setting up any kind of RAID array.
Long story:
In my quest for the most reliable backup, I concluded that all but the
most expensive tape drives are simply too flakey and have too many
problems. Also, since WindozeNT has to be reset 2 or 3 times per week
for NTBACKUP.EXE to correctly execute, any solution that didn't work
with Linux was out. I need to back up about 8-9 GB of data from about
14 of our 20 or so Windoze machines. I wrote a bash script that uses
smbmount to mount volumes from each machine, copy the stuff over to the
Linux box's hard drive, compress it, and log all successes or errors.
[Note: All of the backup apps I've seen have no facility for
automatically grabbing stuff from Windoze PCs, or I wouldn't have
bothered to write my own. I've fine-tuned my script to the point where
it works solidly and is very easy to manage; if someone wants a copy or
has found a better solution, please email me directly.]
The script stores the backups on 3 separate hard drives. I bought 3
identical HDs and 3 removable drive trays with the hope of being able to
hot-swap them later on. As it is, once a week, I have to manually
shutdown the Linux box to switch the drives/trays. This system is still
MUCH better than the misery of Windoze backups; it works consistently,
starts when it's supposed to, doesn't require any work from the Windoze
boxes (or they might screw it up) and my logging system tells me
everything. Since the removable drive tray/rack system lock shuts power
down to the drive before removal, I thought that using umount and
possibly setting the kernel not to probe that device might work, but
disk corruption occurred. A more sophisticated controller or "cut-off"
circuitry seems necessary, although no one makes RAID controllers for
IDE. So, does anyone know how to do this?
Thanks a lot in advance,
Jeff Mings
Computer Specialist
Kyotaru Hawaii Corp.
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