Use of Backup in Anger!

I lost my entire RAID10 array yesterday. In a fit of “too much noise in office” I removed the hot swap SCSI array box from my workstation box, attached it to a wooden platform, and suspended it in a large plastic box using an old inner tube from my bike. This really reduced the noise, however, like a moron, I did not attach the scsi cable properly and 2 drives got kicked from the array. That was not a problem. However, what was, is when I tried to re-assemble the array without checking the cable. I ended up wiping one of the raid partitions. Still not a major issue, except I subsequently zeroed out the superblock of the missing drive in order to add it back in. Anyway, that was my array lost!

As a main backup strategy I use an homebrewed incremental Rsync script to back up my Linux workstation everynight to a 2Tb ReadyNas+ box (Macs are backed up with a combination of Time Machine and Super Duper). So now I had a chance to test it out. So after recreating the array and copying the data across the network I was back up and running!

mdadm --create /dev/md1 --chunk=256 -R  -l 10 -n 4 -p f2 /dev/sd[abcd]3 
echo 300000 >> /sys/block/md1/md/sync_speed_max 
watch cat /proc/mdstat 
mkfs.xfs /dev/md1
mount /home
rsync -avP /mnt/backup/SCOTGATEHome/current/ /home/

It took about 1 hour to sync, and then 3 hours to copy across the 156Gb of files over the network.

It all worked great, and I’m very pleased to know that my backup strategy is working!

Now back to complete the “silent and suspended hard drive array!”