Aller au contenu principal

Move Linux Encrypted BTRFS to RAID-1

Thread needs solution

I have a newly built and configured Fedora-28 system using BTRFS and LUKs encryption. It's running on a single drive at the moment.

My Gigiabyte motherboard supports 2 Drives as a RAID. I have configured it as RAID-1 (Mirror).

I have been trying to copy the functioning single drive onto the blank RAID-1, but I can't get the result to boot properly.

Acronis sees the RAID and will target it as a clone, but the result won't boot correctly.

Would backing up the single drive and restoring to the RAID be any different?

Thanks!

0 Users found this helpful

John, welcome to these User Forums.

Stating the obvious but Acronis True Image is primarily designed for use on / with Windows OS computer and cannot be installed on Linux boxes as there is no native client.

I have used the ATI Rescue media to successfully backup / restore Ubuntu Linux drives using plain EXT4 partitions but this is always performed using Sector-by-Sector mode as ATI does not recognise the filesystem to allow otherwise.

My experience is covered by the ATI 2018 User Guide: Supported file systems listing which includes Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 * file systems, but there is no mention of BTRFS in this list, and encrypted file systems are yet another challenge which the ATI rescue media cannot handle with any degree of guarantee of success.

It might be possible to make a Sector-by-Sector copy (backup image or clone) of the unencrypted BTRFS drive assuming that ATI can read every sector correctly by this mode.

The ATI Rescue Media (all versions) has no support for any encrypted file systems though this has only been documented with regards to BitLocker support.  See KB 56619: Acronis True Image: compatibility with BitLocker  for the official statement in this regard where it states clearly:

You cannot back up encrypted disks in Acronis bootable media.

You may want to take a look at Clonezilla to see if this can handle this migration scenario?

Questions for you,  why did you configure a raid 1 volume of 2 drives on which to put the contents of a btrfs filesystem?

Explain to me the purpose of having a mirrored copy on write filesystem like btrfs?

As followup, btrfs filesystems are unlike conventional NTFS, or EXT4 in that they have advanced capabilities one of which is raid or raid like support.  This support is handled entirely by the filesystem itself and in btrfs is set by the user once the filesystem is installed on a single drive at which time other drives are then added to make a multi drive setup of raid 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10.  Levels 5 and 6 of btrfs have issues which I will not discuss here.

In my opinion the reason the OP could not boot to the target in this scenario is because btrfs will not work when installed on a predefined raid array.  If the OP would have cloned the source disk to a single target disk and then setup the raid on the target and second disks from within the btrfs filesystem, I am confident they would have had success.