Wols Lists wrote: > On 16/06/20 08:34, Dale wrote: >> Right now, I'm backing up to a 8TB external drive, sadly it is a SMR >> drive but it works. As I go along, I'll be breaking down my backups. >> Example. I may have my Documents directory, which includes my camera >> pics, backed up to one drive. I may have videos backed up to another >> drive. Other directories may have to be on other drives. The biggest >> things I don't want to lose: Camera pics that could not be replaced >> except with a backup. Videos, some of which are no longer available. >> That requires a large drive. It currently is approaching 6TBs and I >> have several videos in other locations that are not included in that. >> Documents which would be hard to recreate. Since I have all my emails >> locally, I don't want to lose those either. Just a bit ago, I was >> searching for posts regarding smartctl. I got quite a few hits. > Streaming to an SMR should be fine. Doing a cp to a new directory, or > writing a .tar file, or stuff like that. > > What is NOT fine is anything that is likely to result in a lot of > head-seeking as files and directories get modified ... > > Remember that when backing up - so a btrfs with snapshots, or an lvm > snapshot with rsync in place, is most definitely not a good idea with SMR. > > Cheers, > Wol
Yea, I've read up on them a bit. They have uses where they work fine and one can't really tell the difference between it and a PMR/CMR drive. In my case, it works OK but I have to leave it on a little bit after I complete my backups and even unmount it. There was a thread on this where I asked why I could feel the heads bumping around for a while after my backup was done. I think it was Rich that guessed it was a SMR drive. Before that, never heard of the thing. For the small backups I do every day or two, it works fine. After some research, it was discovered that Rich guessed right. SMR it is. I purposely made sure the drive I recently bought was not a SMR drive tho. I don't want /home on that, or any other file system for my OS. Honestly, I don't plan to buy any SMR drives in the near future. Maybe when all the Linux tools figure out how to deal with and manage them. I might add, I don't have LVM on that drive. I read it does not work well with LVM, RAID etc as you say. Most likely, that drive will always be a external drive for backups or something. If it ever finds itself on the OS or /home, it'll be a last resort. Dale :-) :-)
