Ask Slashdot: Asynchronous RAID-1 Free Software Backup For Laptops?

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 25, 2013 @05:11AM from the just-the-changes-ma'am-just-the-changes dept.

First time accepted submitter ormembar writes "I have a laptop with a 1 TB hard disk. I use rsync to perform my backups (hopefully quite regularly) on an external 1 TB hard disk. But, with such a large hard disk, it takes quite some time to perform backups because rsync scans the whole disk for updates (15 minutes in average). Does it exist somewhere a kind of asynchronous RAID-1 free software that would record in a journal all the changes that I perform on the disk and replay this journal later, when I plug my external hard disk on the laptop? I guess that it would be faster than usual backup solutions (rsync, unison, you name it) that scan the whole partitions every time. Do you feel the same annoyance when backing up laptops?"

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Re:mdadm can do this by Fruit · 2013-07-25 08:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

If you boot the laptop with disk1 and a blank disk, mdadm will see disk1 as the raidset, in degraded mode. Just add the blank disk just as you would if a disk failed in a regular setup. Do test this beforehand. :)