Some of my computers are becoming old and I am concerned the hard drives will eventually break. Due to the large file sizes, backing up takes a long time, so I only backup about twice per month, but am concerned I could lose lots of work between backups. Is it possible to create a duplicate partition, appearing on the same hard drive of a single computer, so any files placed on it are stored twice on the computer, such that if the hard drive breaks, recovery will be much easier?

You can use raid mirroring on using two partitions on same hard disk.

Read raid howto on http://www.tldp.org

Two partitions on the same HDD with the same data will not make recovery any easier. If you want to use RAID1, you need 2 HDDs.

Not really, if the hard drive breaks then assume the worst and you loose all of your data. As stated you need to use two separate drives but do not consider it as your only backup.

What / how are you using to backup your files? rysnc will backup only changes to files so using it my reduce the backup time.

I'll agree that one could raid or rsync or otherwise backup or duplicate a partition to a partition on a single drive. My guess would be that there is limited times for this to work. A better solution would be to spend your time on a better backup solution.

Some backup solutions only transfer the changed data. Not sure what data you have but a usb external is pretty cheap. Can set to run a backup everyday. Can use advanced file systems to for transparent backup and raid.

Your single point of failure is the drive, if it fails, (depending how) there's a high probability that you'll lose both partitions. Keep your second partition on a separate drive (mirror) for resilience.

Play Bonny!

If you're concerned about the hard drive itself, then why are you asking to re-use that same "old" hard drive to store files twice. (I just wrote that fast and then it occurred to me that probably everyone who offered advice echoed that exact sentiment ... yep! )

Get a second hard drive, or an array storage solution.

I wondered if my situation merited an array storage, my current technique is that I use external 1-2 TB USB drives. Here actually is that thread. What I do is at some point I obtain a new drive and copy over all that I intend to keep. The former one stops getting used, but is still valid as of the point I swapped over. I end up doing this every few years. The things which I've had for years, like music files or important documentation, I now have several backups of and really it's my most newest stuff which may be at risk. Ultimately a RAID drive of some type is probably the best solution; however my method still works for me.

Yes
Not really. You'd have two copies of it on the same drive drive. If the drive dies, both copies will die with it. The only thing it protects you from is a lost sector corrupting a file on one partition while leaving the copy on the other partition in-tact. However, since lost sectors generally are a precursor (usually with very little warning) to the entire drive dying, this doesn't help much.


Use an incremental backup solution (like rsync) and your backups should finish very quickly. The more often you run them, the quicker they'll finish. I back up a hair over 3 TB on my home server to external USB drives every night, the first backup took around 24 hours, but since then the backups only takes a few minutes.

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