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Re: HOWTO: Move FreeBSD to a new hard disk
by Jennifer Zhao on Thursday August 28, @12:51AM
Hi, Jason

First thanks very much for your kind advice.

It seems it is not the problem of IDE cable or thermal. For I waited it cool down and use a working IDE cable, and the same error comes.

And I also enter into single user mode and issued
#fsck -p
The result is the known bad partiton show the same error message:
ad0s2g had error reading fsbn 14498.... The following file system had UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY...
So, it seems the fsck -p doesn't work here.
Anyway, I tried the way you said"drivecopy the known bad partition by itself". But it seems I can not do it. For when I issue the command #mount -a, I got error message:
Warning, R/W mount of denied. File system is not clean-run fsck...

Anyway, my guess is that there are some bad partitions in my two drives (IDE HDDS) starting to fail. And the data on them are not retreiveab le any more. A little luck of me is I have a third drive at home, with everything same as the bad drives, except the data on it was 1 month old, for I used it for a full backup one month ago.

Based on those experience, I have a couple of questions here
1.Is it worth to use those two bad drives again and reinstall a simple system on it and drivecopy.sh everything from the third drive to it? Or just discard those bad drives, in case cause my third working drive fail together?
2.How many time of drivecopy.sh can be used on a new HDD before this HDD worn out and can not be safely used any more?
3. I guess a weekly back up by using drivecopy.sh is a little bit too hard on HDD.
But I would express here that drivecopy.sh is a brillant method to move whole FreeBSD system from one drive to another. No doubt at all. The only concern here is whether there is any limit times you can utilize drivecopy.sh on a HDD.
4. Any recommandation on what medium to use to back up a small business server, with not big traffic database (mysql) and a website hosting.

Best regards
Jennifer

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    Re: HOWTO: Move FreeBSD to a new hard disk
    by Jason on Saturday August 30, @10:44AM
    Hi Jennifer,

    First, I don't think a weekly drive copy is asking to much of your hard disks. How much data are we talking about? If it's only a couple of gigabytes then you should expect your drives to hold up just fine.

    I've personallly seen your "fsbn error(s)" on two drives of my own. On one the drive was bad, no question about it. On the other, it turned out to be the removable drive bays I was using. The drive stopped having problem as soon as I moved it out of the bay.

    I have a good contact with a computer store and they see drives that will fail in a system but will pass the manufacturers required tests. The problem is that computer stores often cannot return a drive under warranty if it passes the manufactueres silly little tests. Case and point; I had a problem with a Dell hard disk that could easily pass Dell's 9090 test but would fail constatntly when in the system. After bantering endlessly with Dell tech support I finally just bought a new drive, copied the data over and the problems went away. Dell never replaced their malfunctioning drive even though it was under warranty!

    Re: Question 1-4

    1. I would do whatever you can to save your data.

    2. Many times unless you have very large, very full drives. I've been doing a monthly backup on two pairs of drives since about 1999 without a problem. I recommend single user mode for drivecopy backups on a system whos data is changing regularly (i.e. an SQL server).

    3. drivecopy.sh is a reliable way of moving an installation and doing periodic backups (ie not daily).

    4. If you need to do regaular daily backups I would use a SCSI DAT drive (I prefer Seagate). I have a Samba server at a site where I use drivecopy.sh whenever a major change is made to the system, but use the DAT drive to backup their data on a daily basis.

    Hope this helps.


    Cheers,
    Jason
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