Soft linking

[inverse-ion]

Hi there,

I'm using my old hardware to set up a network file back up server using rsync. I want to have it run auto back ups from there to my two external drives as an extra precaution in case of HDD failure, of which I have a 500GB and a 300GB. I would like to have it so I can treat these drives as one and the same, so if folder A exceeds the 300GB then it will expand onto the 500GB drive, and vice versa. So, if I...

ln -s /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

will it allow folder A to expand to 800GB (given that there is no other files present on the drives), or will it just make the files that exist on each drive visible in the same mount point, with the limitation of the existing storage of each drive?

I hope I'm being clear on the question. If ln doesn't do this, is there an option other than a mirror RAID internal HDD's (remember, I'm working with what I've got)?

[daark.child]

Hi and welcome to the forum. Simply creating symlinks from one disk to another won't work for what you are trying to achieve. One option is to look at RAID and another Logical Volume Management.

[inverse-ion]

Ah, thank you very much!

I've only got 2 drives for this, so RAID5 is out of the question, and RAID0 isn't preferred because I would like the information to still be accessible on one even if the other goes out. To best describe what I want, I could say I'm looking for a way to span a folder across 2 drives without striping a partition across them. I don't care about the read/write benefits of a RAID0 being as it's going to be running in the background when I'm afk.

I'm not new to computers, just Linux, I swear.