[SOLVED] Additional Hard Drive Questions

[ChrisL]

I read what is in the LL manual, but still a little unclear.  What I want to do:

1) Boot to a small primary hard drive (80Gb) as I do now.
2) Add a 500 Gb hard drive as a secondary drive.  This drive would be used as a back-up of the primary and additional storage for music and some video editing clips, etc.

I am using SystemBack (I also have the DejaDup that comes on 2.2) and I would want to set a partition on my secondary drive to the same size as my primary drive and then the remaining space could be used as storage. I am not sure about Systemback, but some similar software like Clonezilla it's difficult to copy your system to a smaller drive partition than your system drive (even if you are only using part of your system drive capacity).  I figured if I make the partition on the second drive equal to the 80Gb drive, then I could not only copy to that, but copy back to the primary in the event of problems.

So, I plan on using Gparted to set the partition sizes on the secondary (80Gb and ~ 420 Gb). Questions:

1) Do I have to format that drive before partitioning, if so what format, how? Right now I think Windows 10 preview is on there, should I "nuke" that first?
2) When I copy my primary drive, I expect it will automatically re-create the existing partitions incl. swap, etc. in that 80Gb partition on the secondary drive? 

Does this make sense, or is there a better way to do this?  I guess another option would be to copy my primary drive to a usb drive, and then just use the whole 500Gb drive for storage? Pretty sure I could back it all up on a 32Gb usb drive.

Two more questions:

I will not be using the secondary drive all the time, and it seems like a waste of energy to power it up all the time and increase wear when I am not using it.
1)  Is there a way other than opening the computer case and disconnecting the power connector to not power-up each time.  Has anyone ever seen a switch to do this?
2)  I am tempted to install a power-up switch on the outside of my case to allow this, anyone ever done this?

Chris

[N4RPS]

Hello!

No need to kludge up your computer. Since you're not going to use 500GB all the time, just buy a small external 500GB USB drive to plug in as needed. That way, you can share the external with other PCs, if needed. (BTW, the last piece of computer equipment I kludged up was a Commodore 1541 floppy drive.)

It's strange, but an external drive is cheaper than an internal drive. As a result, I used to buy externals and take them out of the case, to use in a laptop or PC - until they started putting the USB interface and the drive controller on the same board.

If you already HAVE the bigger drive, then just buy a USB external case, and put it in THAT. Either way, you can either partition out 80GB for backup or use what I use (Redo Backup) to copy the 80GB drive to the 500GB drive in its entirety, since the 80GB has more than one partition...

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

[gold_finger]

ChrisL,

I've been mulling over how to best answer this for a while.

Have to say that I'm leaning heavily in same direction as N4RPS on this.  If you're really not going to use the drive very often and are concerned about it powering on when not being used, then best bet would be to put the drive in an external enclosure.

Reasons why?

1.  As N4RPS stated, you can turn it on whenever you want and you can share the drive between computers if you want to as an added benefit.

2.  Because it sounds like you want to clone partitions vs. just backing up certain data files, if you keep a cloned copy of the Root partition in the computer, that clone will have the same UUID as the current Root partition.  That will cause problems because booting will look to both of them.  If you keep a clone on computer, you need to change the UUID of that partition before trying to boot into your system again.  It would also be a good idea to change the "/etc/fstab" file on the clone to match the new UUID.  That way you don't have to remember to do that later.


If you go with an external enclosure, go ahead and clone the whole drive over (see note below on Windows 10 first).  That will (I think) copy the MBR along with the Root and Swap partitions and it should be bootable on its own when you're done.

If you want to clone to the drive with it connected internally, then only clone the Root partition.  Just leave free space available for adding Swap later if that becomes necessary.  Keep a live DVD/USB handy of the same version of Linux Lite that you have on that backup.  You'll need it to install grub boot loader to MBR if you need to start booting from that drive.  (There is a link for reinstalling grub from live DVD listed under this tutorial.)


Formatting of partitions?  I've only toyed around with cloning a couple of time, so not 100% sure.  I think the cloning process copies not only the data but the filesystem type as well, so I don't think you need to worry about that.

Windows 10?  If you want to keep it, then don't do a full disk clone -- clone the partitions one at a time in partitions you create on the disk after the Windows partition(s).

[ChrisL]

I just noticed the last response (from gold_finger, back in December).  Just as a follow-up , I got rid of Windows 10.  It was fun to play with a new system a bit, but I like Linux a lot better. 


I thought the external drive was a good option, but rather than buy external cases I bought a Docking Station as I have numerous spare drives.  I just sort of happened upon one of these looking at external cases as I did not know they existed:


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AWG3JFA/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1


So far, so good.  There are quite a few different models of these around, not recommending this particular one, or any one, just showing you what I'm talking about.


I use my spare drives in the docking station for back-ups.  I decided to put in a second 1TB drive not as a back-up, but for video editing, music, etc. and set up a partition on there to hold common data files (music, videos, documents).  I figure the power usage isn't that bad, especially sioce the SSD uses very little.


Thanks!


Chris

[N4RPS]

Hello!

That's an EXCELLENT suggestion - especially if one has several drives lying around unused!

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

[ukbrian]

I followed a similar path and eventually found esata + USB 2 hubs, esata is quicker http://www.cclonline.com/product/85436/USB-HDK-E/External-HDD-Enclosure/Dynamode-SATA-to-eSATA-USB-HDD-Docking-Station-with-One-Touch-Back-up-Button/HDD3472/
I also got one of these for my desktop http://www.cclonline.com/product/61580/PEXESATA1/IDE-SATA-SCSI-Cards/StarTech-com-1-Port-PCI-Express-eSATA-Controller-Card-Storage-controller-SATA-300-300-MBps-PCI-Express-x1/CNT0085/

From your OP

This drive would be used as a back-up of the primary

I posted a video of cloning a Debian OS to another partition on a thread  here. https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/index.php?topic=829.msg9597#msg9597

You have to exclude the "data" folder but leave the symlinks

I managed to tweak the script so that it added the "data" folder back into the clone and also added the fstab line to mount the data partition so when you boot into it everything "works"

The Yad script was written for Debian Squeeze but still works on Wheezy and LL which uses systemd bits so I'm thinking it will still work on Jessie.

Using a backup partition rather than a backup file might seem strange but with a hub it works well, you can boot into it and know it works unlike a backup file.

If you want to give saline-backup a try I'll post more details friend, I think there's only one dependency needed "squashfs-tools"