Spare boot HD - suggestions ideas

[cnull]

I have a box that rarely changes. I am taking backups etc... but I was thinking that I would like to have a spare hd sitting on the shelf that I could plug into the box at any time and boot to it in case something happened(see history).

This is of course on top of a mirrored drive.

A little history... managment was convinced that another unamed person should have root access to the box in case something happened to me (bus runs me over, car goes over the edge of a hillside, you know the typical deadly accidents). This unnamed person accidentally ran rm -r ./ from the root directory (he thought he was in another directory). So in this case a mirror did not help. And to be honest I leaned that the backups were no good. Ouch!!! Rebuilt and licked my wounds!

The system is a Sunfire V240 with 2 internal drives mirrored. All major partitions are local while the data is stored on a fiber attached SAN drive.

Can I just cp the whole disk(i'm sure that there are more steps, but I don't know what they would be)? or is there some better method where I can remove the current mirrored HD and replace it with a new drive? Does that work? Any details would be helpfull.

Maybee I'm overthing this? Is there a simpler method?

 

[elgrandeperro]

Are you using all 4 drive slots?

 

[elgrandeperro]

My thought would be if you weren't just to leave it in there, with just the metadbs and all the devices metainit'ed as in your mirror. Then when you want to take a copy, just metattach, wait for the sync, then metadettach. You might as well leave the metadbs part of the running metadbs, no sense in destroying them every time. Oh, and install the boot blocks (one time).

 

[cnull]

Good idea. I'll have to lookup the details on installing the boot blocks. I have done that before but it has been a long time.
Thanks!

 

[cndcadams]

cnull;

Check out this thread;

thread60-1357198

Thanks CA