mdlbear | Blink... blink... (Reply)

Between the time change (it's dark) and the weather (it's wet) it's been a bad morning for driving. Luckily the streets were practically empty in my neighborhood when I took the Younger Daughter (super_star_girl) to school. And again a few minutes later when I brought her the pair of glasses she'd left on the shelf. Probably did it just to try out her new cell phone, her big 14^th birthday present.

Spent most of yesterday afternoon moving data around on my fileserver, trying to upgrade from three ill-assorted disk drives (4 and 9 GB SCSI, and a 120GB IDE drive) to a 200GB IDE drive. It's done except for moving the root partition, which is currently still on the 120, and archiving the current state of things on the 120. This requires compression, because it's currently 97% full. And that's slow.

The large partition on the 120GB drive currently contains three main items: about 7.5GB of old backups (from when I switched from RedHat to Debian), 67GB of Debian mirror, and 23GB of multimedia files (including all my recorded tracks), which compress down to an 18GB .tar.bz2 file. This takes time, even on a fairly fast machine. (I just finished a tar tjf [archive] | tail to make sure it wasn't corrupted -- it took about two hours.)

After I replace the multimedia files with the compressed tar file (currently it's on the new drive because there wasn't room to compress it in place) (ok, that's taken care of), I'll have enough room to back up the partitions that used to be on the SCSI drives. I'll do that tonight. Then I get to move the root partition (trivial) and make sure it still boots (not always trivial, but hopefully straightforward).

After that the next step will be to move the Debian mirror. I have a lightly-used 160GB drive (it's been languishing in a USB enclosure for a year or so) that I'm probably going to put on the gateway to replace its ancient 20GB drive. Putting the mirror on the gateway, which is also the public webserver, would make sense anyway. (On the other hand, I may just leave it on the internal fileserver and consider replacing the gateway's root partition with a flash disk.)

In any case, the old 120 then goes on the shelf as an archived snapshot. The final piece of the puzzle is my other 200GB drive, presently in another USB enclosure. This will be formatted to match the new drive on the fileserver, and mirrored nightly. Yes, I could put them in a RAID-1 configuration. But that only protects against hardware failure; if the filesystem gets corrupted in a power failure, or an important file gets accidentally deleted, it happens on both of them. Eventually I'll put the mirror off in another room on a small fileserver.