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I have a 2TB and a 1.5 TB hard drive. My ultimate goal is that I have a partition of 1.5 TB which is mirrored to both disks, so that I won't lose data if one hard disk crashes. Of course I'd like to be able to use the remaining 500 GB as well, but I don't need it mirrored. This is only about data, the system is on another harddisk.

I'm not sure which is the best way to achieve that. I have thought of the following things:

  • Raid 1 (although I'm not sure whether I could still use the remaining 500 GB then). Also I read that the partitions should be exactly the same size..

  • set up some rsync (not very convenient)

  • use LVM (although I'm not sure what to with that exactly)

    My goal is to a) have redundancy so I won't lose data if one hd crashes and b) ideally gaining some performance if possible using e.g. raid

Any advice is appreciated!

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I'm not sure what the purpose of this setup is- do you need both hard drives to be functional (and identical), or are you just referring to a full-on backup?

For a backup, there are several available tools to make complete backups. There is, of course, the deja dup tool, but you may wish to use something else. (There is also the dd tool from the command line; type man dd at the terminal to understand syntax.)

Backup tools are discussed here; a common tool is Clonezilla.

EDIT:

Here's the cleanest means of using the dd function:

"dd if=/dev/hda1 of=./part1.image to backup(repeat for different partitions) dd if=./part1.image of=/dev/hda1 to restore"

Original post is here. Running this command periodically will give you a bit-perfect copy of your partition.

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    My goal is to a) have redundancy so I won't lose data if one hd crashes and b) ideally gaining some performance if possible using e.g. raid
    – stebu92
    Feb 28, 2014 at 16:31
  • Do you need both hard drives to boot, each with identical data? My suggestion would be just to make backups for easy reinstallation in case anything goes wrong. It could be quite inconvenient trying to get every iota of information to synchronize (every update, software package, cookie, etc.)
    – Qu0rk
    Feb 28, 2014 at 16:34
  • This is only about data. The system runs on another disk. I clarified it in the question.
    – stebu92
    Feb 28, 2014 at 18:01
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I would say soft raid is probably the way to go (so mdadm). On the smaller disk, you create a partition filling it. You check how big it is. You create a partition of the same size on the bigger disk and another partition to fill the rest of it. You set up a raid on the two partitions of equal size. You should be able to look up the rest yourself...

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