How's that for a titillating subject? Don't worry, I know RAID doesn't 
obviate the need for backups. I'm interested in getting RAIDframe to do 
the work of making backups for me.

My home fileserver running 1.6.2 has root and swap on RAID1, configured 
according to <URL:http://users.piuha.net/martti/bsd/raid/>. The two 
ordinary IDE drives are in sleds on the front of the machine that are 
designed to be easy to insert and remove. (Not hot-swap, of course, but 
I don't need that.)

Conveniently, I have a third drive of equal capacity which is just 
sitting around. I'm thinking it'd be clever to regularly pull one of the 
RAID1 drives, call that my "backup", slide in the spare, and reconstruct 
the RAID set.

It appeals to me that the task at which I'd get lots of practice would 
be "RAID reconstruction" rather than "making backups". Making backups 
isn't particularly interesting, whereas reconstructing a RAID set every 
couple weeks will leave me somewhat comfortable with most of the 
procedure I'll need to follow when a disk inevitably dies.

Is this as good an idea as it seemed when it popped into my head? When I 
swap in a drive that was part of the RAID set two weeks ago, how can I 
be sure that RAIDframe will reconstruct _onto_ it, not _from_ it? 
Anything else I should be worried about?

- Amitai