Yes, it will be an NTFS partition, but with the "plus" kernel you can use the read-only ntfs module to read the data on the Linux side, just take an LVM snapshot, use the loopback with the sector offset of the partition in the snapshot lv to mount it locally. Remove the snapshot when done.
Does the snapshot take utilize the same amount of space? If I have 3TB of files, do a snapshot, do I then have 6TB of data on disk?
A little more background....
Why we are doing this is we are (re)building our array to store our disk-disk backups using BackupExec. The older versions did no mind using a smb share but since we have updated to 10d it will not connect and Symantec/Veritas does not support this. That is why we thought iSCSI would do the trick.
You can't rsync NTFS partitions, but you could use drbd and scheduled replication to block-level replicate it. Use drbd without heartbeat, have it sync up asynchronously using Prot A, once it is sync'd have it disconnect and run standalone with secondary in wait-for-connect, using 'cron' bring up the connection again, when it is sync'd bring it down again.
Where rysnc came in for us was we then take some of those backups and spool them off over a VPN to a remote site. In addition, we would take a SATA drive, mount it, copy some data, pull it, then take it offsite like people traditionally do with tape. I have read a bit about drdb and that might work. We would have to be selective somehow since we have a smaller array at the other end meant to only hold 2wks of backups.
We used to do this with a 1TB array and smb but our data has grown fairly rapidly.
Would something like NFS possibly suit us better?
Thanks for the suggestions!
Andrew