Removing removable ATA hard drives
Antony Mawer
fbsd-questions at mawer.org
Thu Oct 5 16:07:47 PDT 2006
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
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