[CentOS] Turn an ext2 filesystem into a component of a mirrored RAID?

Mon Nov 27 20:39:54 UTC 2006
MrKiwi <mrkiwi at gmail.com>

Bart Schaefer wrote:
> We have a CentOS 3 server with about 300GB of data on an ext2
> filesystem that we need to mirror onto a new drive, which we're then
> going to pull out and put into a second server.  A straight
> disk-to-disk copy (with rsync, tar, or "cp -a" doesn't much matter)
> manages about 75MB per minute, which would take almost three days, and
> the system gets very sluggish while such a copy is going on, so we
> can't afford to just let it run.
> 
> Is it possible, without loss of data, to convert the existing ext2
> filesystem into a mirrored software RAID, then add the new drive as a
> second device and let rebuilding the RAID take care of making the
> copy?  Even if this took more time, we've had good overall system
> performance with software RAIDs rebuilding in the background before,
> so it could run as long as necessary.  We'd then need to be able to
> remove the second device from the RAID and either convert it back into
> a plain ext2 or put it into a similar software RAID in the destination
> machine.
> 
> Is this possible?  Is there another plan that would make more sense?
> 
> Thanks in advance for suggestions.
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Does rsync with the bandwidth limiting features still slow 
the system unacceptably?

Just a thought,

MrKiwi,