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I need to mirrior my life drive so that the hard drive we mirror it to is bootable. Does the server need to be off to do this? What's the best way to do this? It's a 160GB drive with anywhere from 60-100 GB actually used.

Sorry, we're on Linux and I'm talking about cloning a drive, not RAID.

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  • ummm, OS? software or hardware mirroring?
    – MadHatter
    Dec 7, 2010 at 14:14
  • Are you talking about running a RAID or are you talking about cloning a drive? I assume you're talking about a RAID but it's not clear.
    – DKNUCKLES
    Dec 7, 2010 at 14:25
  • Cloning a drive
    – Ben
    Dec 7, 2010 at 14:39
  • What is "life drive"?
    – poige
    Feb 13, 2011 at 12:27

2 Answers 2

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Definitely depends on the OS. If you use a block copy tool, your server (really just OS) will have to be off.

If you use a file copy tool, like SuperDuper for OS X, you can run your server while the copy happens.

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It's not necessary to shutdown the server. Attach your new disk and then clone all data to new disk:

dd bs=4k if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=noerror,sync
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  • Actually this can be done in such way only if you're sure nothing changes the source drive while you're copying it. Otherwise you end up with total mess on the destination drive.
    – poige
    Feb 13, 2011 at 12:29
  • Yeah, it's a good idea to remount drive as read only mode but it's not always possible.
    – Valery Viktorovsky
    Feb 13, 2011 at 13:10

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