Re: Converting system to raid

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Jon Lewis <jlewis@lewis.org> writes:

> On Fri, 10 Apr 2009, Robin Hill wrote:
>
>> On Fri Apr 10, 2009 at 12:22:44PM -0700, Timothy D. Lenz wrote:
>>
>>> How can cp not work? every guide I found used ether cp or rsync. Even
>>> guides on seting up an auto backup system use cp or rsync.
>>> Seems the only files/folders that shouldn't get copied are the block
>>> device ones that are created at boot and are not really on the drive.
>>>
>> They'll all get copied, but you won't necessarily get the correct
>> contents.  Because the system is in use:
>> - files will be being written, so you'll either get a partial copy, or
>>   an old version.
>> - files may be locked, so you won't be able to copy them.
>>
>> Doing a backup of a running system using cp/rsync will work fine for a
>> lot of things (especially for config files, documents, etc) but will
>> almost certainly fail miserably for some (databases for example).

What one can easily do is rsync the running system, then init 1 and
rsync again to get all the changed or blocked files. In runlevel 1
there should be nothing left blocking files.

MfG
        Goswin