Topic: Switch to raid

[raymondh]

I know it wasn't smart but it happened...

I have installed sme 5.5 on a single ide drive so I could "just test it out" :->

Well, after days of customizing and tons of help from the folks here, I love it and it's doing exacally what I need it to do.  But now the problem.  I want to go live with the server but desire raid.  I don't have any user data on it, just customized pages, templates, rpm's, etc.  Is there a way for me to upgrade to raid at this point?

Can I backup the drive, install a new server in raid mode and then restore?

Live and learn...

[Mike]

That's exactly what you'll want to do.

If you have a tape drive handy, then simply do a system backup to tape (see the Backup panel in the server manager), install again (this time with two hard drives in RAID), and then perform a restore.

If you *don't* have a tape drive handy, you can try the "Backup to Desktop" option in the Backup panel.  SME Server will bundle your files together and download a tarball to your desktop via your web browser.  Then, install the new version (don't upgrade - it needs to be a fresh install so that you can activate RAID), and restore your backup via the backup panel.

[Kelvin]

Note of warning Raymond :

SME's Backup to desktop does not backup any customisations.

SME's backup to tape will backup everything but the built in restore will only restore the same things as the Backup to desktops (and you will lose your customisations).

This has always been a problem with the built in backup procedure as there is no "quick" way (short of a ghost image) to rebuild a heavily customised server in the event of a total system failure. Pretty useless to backup everything to tape if there is no easy way to restore it. The old hands at this will say -- learn the command line to do it. That's one way, but it's still pretty poorly that the option to do a full restore is not available as an option either through server manager or the console status screen. Besides, in the event of a disaster, everyone wants their server back up and running like yesterday, agreed ?

However, back to your issue, even with a ghost image it does not help you if you want software RAID (as the image is made from a single drive install).

Kelvin

[Nathan Fowler]

Just tar-gzip your entire drive, move the tarball to your machine, do a fresh install on RAID-1, boot into single user mode, and untar your backup.

Nathan

[Morten Fjendbo]

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=15671.msg60336#msg60336

[Ray]

Can I really just tar / untar the drive and change to raid?  This sounds too easy, what's the catch?