July 7, 2011 at 8:12 am
Two kinds of restore tests for drive images:
1) Lower risk to your production system, but more likely to show quirks that wouldn't be there if restoring to the source hardware: Restore to an identical, different system on bare drives (every card in the same slot as the original, the same model cards, the same firmware levels across the board).
2) Higher (but still low) risk to your production system, won't show the different hardware quirks: Take multiple backups of your existing system, including a drive image (in case you drop the drives). Do a RAID consistency check (this may take many hours to a few days) to ensure your RAID doesn't have one drive with issues (so you have reasonable confidence it'll protect you if you drop one drive). Shut down, pull your current drives out one at a time, carefully place them on a shelf. Insert blank drives (if you really want, brand new ones, perhaps faster than you had before, but at least the same size. Note different brands/models have different interpretations of "146GB"). Restore to this setup. Optional: go back to your original drives afterwards (if the new drives are much better/newer, you may not want to let them go).
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