On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 10:18:47AM +0000, John Long wrote: > Hi, > > I have a server running OpenBSD. It has slots for 4 drives. I have the > OS and web content on one drive and media files on another drive. I > have been running rsync to backup these drives to identically-sized > drives in the same box. Basically 2 drives are used to run the services > (dlna, Samba, http) and the other 2 drives are backups. > > I would like to use softraid so that I don't have to run backups > manually or on a schedule with cron etc. I understand RAID is not a > backup strategy but at the same time my threat model is failing > hardware rather than anything else. > > Is there a way to use softraid to create 2 separate RAID mirrors of the > two main drives that are already populated with data?
Hello, I guess what you're really asking is: is there some way to 'upgrade' the current disks metadata so that they become RAID 1 disks which then can be 'duplicated' by using bioctl(8)'s rebuild? In that case: Not AFAIK, and it would probably be a messy and risky affair anyway. I believe you will be forced to manually duplicate your existing disk and partition layouts to newly created RAID 1 sets and then do a lot of dd(1)'ing. Not trivial, at least not for the os drive, but doable. As for backup strategy: Just make sure you keep at least a third disk (and probably a fourth as well, both known to be functional copies of course), truly offline and cycling them only with other known functional copies. (The good thing with RAID as backup is its 'instantly-duplicate- what-i-want' capacity, while the downside is the equally efficient 'instantly-duplicate-my-mistakes-and-errors-as-well' feature'...) Good luck, Erling > Thanks, > > /jl
