I just got myself an 500Gb external disk and want to backup/clone my 2x100Gb RAID0.

Can anyone advise on how to go about this. Is there any good software or is it best just to use dd? Do I have to create partitions on my destination that correspond to my source partitions or is there software that can do this for me? Do I back up each of my disks individually or should I clone them as a combined disk?

I have my suspicions about the answers to these but just want to get as much input as possible first.

Im on Gentoo. I want it to be a manual process.

Cheers.

Simply boot a LiveCD (the Gentoo CD should do), mount the external (read-write) and the internal drives (read-only), and rsync one onto the other.

But rsync works at the file level right? I think it makes more sense to image each of my disks individually (so in the case of failure I can just restore each disk to restore my RAID setup). Is rsync able to work on a partition that doesnt make any sense on its own, i.e. without its corresponding partition from my other disk?

Yes, it does. This makes the backup unrelated to the original file system, raid level or whatever setup - you can restore your backup on any other machine, even if it does not have raid software installed.

Not necessarily. If you lose a whole disk, you can always recreate the raid 0 and restore everything. Or chose to create a raid 1, 5, or no raid whatsoever.

To me, the more flexible a backup is, the better. And using rsync makes you gain time when you update your backup, resulting in a slightly higher motivation to do the backups.

Yeah, Ive just come around to this way of thinking so now Im thinking rsync is the way to go. Thanks.