Quote:
Originally Posted by onthetopo
1.I want to have a cloned disk as bootable backup
2.When booting using the master drive, I also want to mount the cloned backup disk so I can do incremental backup of certain files
. and use the clone disk as free disk space.
I think you're looking at this the wrong way.
You have 2 disks, one is larger (backup disk) than the other (primary disk) from what i understand.
In that case, you will partition the primary disk as you wish, but will make them Software RAID volumes. On disk 2 - the backup - you'll create the exact same partitions of the same size, with partition type = Software Raid.
At this point you have one disk fully allocated - the primary, and one which is an exact copy (man sfdisk for the easy way to make an exact copy) plus some free space at the end. Go ahead and create an extra partition for the free space, this will be your backup area.
Configure the software raid (there's thousands of docs on this so i wont repeat), configure your boot loader to boot disk 2 if disk 1 fails, then setup your backup process (rsnapshot?) to backup to the "spare" partition at the end of disk 2.
Hope this helps you see the concept & a more workable way to achieve.
-c