How to mirror a harddisk for backup purpose - preference

[Felix Rauch]

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com wrote:
> i dont usully care about speed difference... if its not noticeable...
> ( isn't it done yet .. than i care ) tar vs cp vs rsh|tar etc..etc..
> 	everybody else ( college kids ? ) are more than welcome to 
> 	play with the speed and performance differences

It doesn't need to be college kids. We actually presented a paper at
EuroPar 2000 about a quite related subject: "Partition Cast -
Modelling and Optimizing the Distribution of Large Data Sets in PC
Clusters" (see e.g. [1] for abstract, full paper, presentation
slides). There we compare the NFS-approach with our own solution.

A practical experience with our own tool dolly: We recently had to
install a new 128-node cluster, so we cloned the master disk (20 GB
/dev/hda) to all machines using two Fast Ethernet interfaces. It took
us less then 20 minutes for the cloning (approx. 15 MB/s sustained to
all nodes).

- Felix

[1] http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/publications/
-- 
Felix Rauch                      | Email: rauch at inf.ethz.ch
Institute for Computer Systems   | Homepage: http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~rauch/
ETH Zentrum / RZ H18             | Phone: ++41 1 632 7489
CH - 8092 Zuerich / Switzerland  | Fax:   ++41 1 632 1307