backup existing sata drive

[Damian Wiest]

On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 03:20:33AM -0700, Dino Vliet wrote:
> Eeh, are the differences between real backup and point
> in time recovery?

Point in time recovery allows you to restore you system to a single 
point in time.  Backups, depending on how they're performed, give you 
multiple points in time from which to recover.

> What I want is to have a identical backup drive at
> every moment in time. So even if I add or delete files
> on my primary hard disk, I would want to have that.
> But then again, if I go this route, if I wipe out my
> whole disk accidentally, the backup would be wiped out
> too? But still, I'm not that stupid or, it never
> happens so I don't think it will happen now. 

You're talking about disk mirroring which will not help you 
if you accidentally delete or overwrite a file.  Use your
system long enough and this _will_ happen.

> So, I think I want to two disk to be identical so that
> gives me less headache if one of them fails.
> 
> Dump can use my ubuntu partition as well so I will be
> able to use that. But that will give me point-in-time
> recovery, right?

Yes.  Keep in mind that dump remembers, via dump levels,  what's been
backed up so it will do incremental backups.

> Geom looks cool, I will start reading the docs and
> look into them. I've found the article of Dru Lavigne,
> and the freebsd handbook has some sections as well
> about it and I've found
> http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/RAID1,_Software,_How_to_setup
> 
> Enough to read before my drives arrive. Hope I won't
> encounter problems because I'm afraid I could loose
> everything.
> 
> Thanks for your answer.

I'd go with GEOM.  Extremely easy to setup and maintain.

-Damian