[BBLISA] archiving to small disks to big disks

[John Stoffel]

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

So what happens when one of the 1Tb disks won't spin up?  How critical
iss this data?  

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

Then you're doing to want to use some sort of RAID, either for the
data itself, or for the storage you lay the filesystems down on.  Do
you require that you can access the data using only one disk, or can
you require that 5 out of 6 work to let you get data off?  

BMcA> I see two choices:

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

I'd probably do thiss, but instead create a RAID6 of 6 disks, which I
then create 47 LVs in which I just copy the data from the original
disks.  

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

Sorta like my idea above, but with less reliability.  Think, what
happens when one of those five disks won't spin up in 5 year's time?
How up the river will you be then?

Heck, if I could I'd just dump the data to tape multiple times and
then not worry about it.  LTO4 would do wonderfully for this, and you
could make multiple copies of the tape.

John