Removing removable ATA hard drives

[Antony Mawer]

On 5/10/2006 7:31 PM, Jonathan McKeown wrote:
> I should probably have said: we don't currently have offsite backups (we've 
> exceeded the capacity of our tape device and our budget), and the quick-fix 
> solution is dumping to this hard drive and then pulling it out and taking it 
> home. As such the removability is key to its intended function. I can't keep 
> dropping the main fileserver to fiddle with it, and the alternative in terms 
> of testing is to set up another box with the particular 4.9-STABLE snapshot 
> running on this server (to eliminate OS version-related variable effects).

I looked into these options, and in the end opted for an external 
firewire hard drive for *ONE* of my offsite backup systems. I initially 
looked at USB, but found it to be somewhat flakey and didn't feel 
comfortable relying on it.

I installed a firewire add-in card in the backup server, and am then 
using GELI to encrypt the data on the drive. I have a script which 
automates the attaching to the geli volume, mounting the filesystem, 
rsyncing from various sources, and then unmounting the filesystem... 
after which I can turn off the drive and take it offsite with me.

This is on FreeBSD 6.1, so I don't know what, if any, firewire support 
is available on 4.x...

ATA "hotswap", from what I gather, is only possible with specific 
hardware support, and even then is not something that it was originally 
designed for (as far as I am aware)...

Hope you or others find some of this helpful!

--Antony