[Box Backup] one drive headin' south - recovery methods?

[Ben Summers]

On 3 Jan 2007, at 08:09, Garry Glendown wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I just noticed some minor problems, which seem to be caused by one  
> of the backup drives starting to go bad. I'm currently copying  
> everything to another drive, several .rf-files seem to be affected  
> (read errors during copy).
>
> As the other two storages seem to be intact, what do I need to do  
> other than drop in a new HD and copy everything back over to it?  
> RAID5 should take care of inconsistencies, but is BB smart enough  
> to identify which of the three .rf-files is defective? Or need I  
> physically delete/not copy the bad files?

You should not copy the bad files. The raidfile library will drop  
back to recovery mode when a file is not present or it gets a read  
error from the OS. If you copy corrupt files to the new disc, it will  
not detect the problem as there is no read error, and you will get  
bad data back.

Note you cannot recreate a lost drive. If a drive dies, you can use  
the store for reading but not writing. I plan to remove raidfile  
support in the next major version -- software RAID support is much  
better these days, and the raidfile support is not complete as it  
doesn't have full recovery options.

Ben