Hot swap hard drives

Uptime-

Yes you can do this.

Make sure you keep a backup on site as well. You never know what will happen to that off-site unit.

Luck-

DaddyPaycheck

Welcome to discussions!

I swap out one of my HDs each day to send off site. As long as we remember to unmount it first with Disk Utiltiy, it's fine. If we forget, the server will panic. Last time it happened to my assistant, I could hardly keep from laughing!

On my machine, the left drive is the root drive, the middle is a clone which stays there, and the right drive is a clone that gets sent offsite. Each morning, after checking the logs to make sure things are okay, we run an asr based script to clone the root drive to each of the others, then unmount the right one (it could be one of three drives that are in rotation for this, two would be enough but in the winter months I'd rather let the drive warm up before inserting it and I had an extra just laying around) and pull it out and insert the next right drive. It will mount automatically. Except for the paper work, that's it.

Roger

Idea: Set up a RAID 1 (mirror) with Disk Utility, using the "automatic rebuild option" and swap out one of the drives.

Although this seems at first blush, to be really slick, the more I think about it, the more I think rsync would be a lot more efficient; I bet when the RAID does a rsync, it does it for every used block (vs. changed). Anybody know for sure?

BTW: Here's an interesting article on setting up a RAID in place:

<http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20040827122302975>

I bet when the RAID does a rsync

Whoops; I meant REsync there. 🙂

>Idea: Set up a RAID 1 (mirror) with Disk Utility, using the "automatic rebuild option" and swap out one of the drives.

Don't do this. Bad idea.

Breaking a mirror is an inherently dangerous action. You do run the risk of losing any data that is in the process of being written as you pull the drive, but more importantly the OS will flag that drive as bad and you will have trouble re-using it in the future.

The right way to do this is to use the drive as a separate volume, and using one of a number of tools (asr, Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, etc.) to replicate the data.