[BBLISA] archiving to small disks to big disks

[Brian McAllister]

I'm preparing to archive data from 47 120G disks onto 5 1TB disks which
will then sit on a shelf.  They may never be accessed again.  The 120G
disks are filled to varying degrees.  Total data is ~4.5TB.

I'm interested in making efficient use of the 1TB disks but also in
maximizing integrity and usability in the future.  Preserving the overall
organization of the data (by original disk) is required.  Filesystem is
ext3.

I see two choices:

1) Create 1 partition per disk and copy many original disks to it.

2) Create many partitions, each sized slightly larger than the space
   required for each original disk.

Option 1 is easier and possibly more convenient to use.

Option 2 seems potentially more robust.

Thoughts ?

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Brian McAllister                                   Senior Software Engineer
mcallister at mit.edu                      Bates Research & Engineering Center
(617) 253-9537                                                Middleton, MA