Setting up RAID 1 on Tiger server

[skent01]

My wife is preparing to leave her job to take up an even more demanding profession (mother). She wants to set their current server up with RAID 1 to provide some redundancy. Everything I have read talks about setting up RAID on 2 new unpartitioned disks. Basically what I want to know is that if she sets her current hard drive and the second drive up in RAID 1, is it going to want to reformat the drive and thus lose all of her data?

Thanks,

Steve

[giskard22]

Yes. (Damn the 10-character minimum message length!)

[slacker]

Why not just setup a cron job and use rsyncx to periodically archive to a second drive? I don't know why so many people think that RAID1 is a good idea. You are 100 times more likely to inadvertently delete or corrupt important files and RAID1 guarantees that both volumes are toast. Nightly backups with rsync are much safer.

www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ system_disk_utilities/rsyncx.html

[giskard22]

Some of us want to use it in conjunction with backing up to yet another volume. See my thread (http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=42426) -- I'm going to use the 3rd drive as a backup. The RAID is there so if a drive dies there isn't havoc from the users.

[CAlvarez]

The two are not mutually exclusive, and if your data is worth something, you should do both.

[gabester]

See this page...

http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20040827122302975

I can't vouch for it myself... but that should do the trick. I'd just advise backing up the drive with all important data BEFORE trying this; and give it plenty of time to synch after trying it before putting it back into a live situation.
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[skent01]

Well she already has an external FW bootable backup. The RAID 1 is just for redundancy.

What about just setting the internal drives as RAID1, formatting them both and then cloning the bootable backup back onto the internal drives? Would that break the RAID mirror?

[skent01]

Ok. I have a most unbelievable set of circumstances and I need some advice ASAP. Booted off of the external hard drive and followed the instructions in the link above. Everything worked great until rebuilding the RAID set. Disk Utility crashed and then the whole server crashed. The bootable backup will no longer boot and I cannot boot off of the internal HD either. I brought it all home and I am thinking that I am gonna try to pop the internal drive into an external firewire case that I have. Is that not a good idea? Any other help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve

[giskard22]

The bootable backup can probably be fixed, either by running something like DiskWarrior, Repair Permissions, or even doing an Archive & Install on it.

I'm afraid others will have to provide guidance regarding the RAID issue.

[skent01]

Got it all sorted out. Now I have user/shares questions about 10.4 server. Please see here:http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?p=223394#post223394

Thanks for you help