> 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