LVM To Combine 2 x 2TB Arrays Without Losing Data???

Question

have a new MD1000 (~7TB, but only ~2TB is used) that I need backed up. I have 2 PV220s (2TB each) attached to a PE2850 that will function as the backup. I will later add 2 more PV220s (2TB each) to bring the total to 8TB. One of the arrays is a full 2TB ext3 (GPT) partition that i want to expand to 4TB (and in the future expand again to 8TB) without losing the data on it each time. Is this possible? Can I implement LVM to extend to 4TB w/out lose of data? I'm a Windows guy and in Disk Management you are able to extend a partition w/out losing anything, but everything i come across says i have to start fresh when i start using LVM. If this is completely impossible (or too time consuming to save the data) then I can reformat and copy back the data; its 2+TB over gigabit ethernet, so I want to avoid that. thanx in advance

riskable · Answer

If you're already managing your disks with LVM then yes, you can expand them on-the-fly without losing data. Depending on which Linux distribution you're using I highly recommend you use the EVMS gui to do this. EVMS is an alternative to LVM but you can actually manage LVM partitions with the EVMS gui and it's quite nice.

There's some EVMS screenshots here: http://evms.sourceforge.net/gui_screen/ (that is also the main website for EVMS).

If you're not using LVM you can expand your storage the offline way using qtparted or gparted (depending on which file system you're using).

For the command line stuff here's some HOWTOs:

http://evms.sourceforge.net/user_guide/
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/lvm2.xml (nice and short, shows the commands in action)

-Riskable
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LVM To Combine 2 x 2TB Arrays Without Losing Data???

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