I have a Thecus N8800+ NAS. It has 8 2TB drives and is RAID 6. One of the drives recently has been reported as having bad blocks, though the RAID is still reported as healthy.
I want to replace the drive before it fails, but I have never administered a NAS before. How do I replace the drive and maintain data integrity? Can I just pull out the drive and replace it while things are running or do I need to shut it down somehow? How will the RAID rebuild after I replace the drive?
I want to mirror my Amazon S3 buckets. I want to do this because 1) I don't want all my data only existing with one provider; and 2) in case of software error or security breach I want to have the data backed up.
I can mirror to a local disk with the s3cmd sync function, but that does not scale for very large buckets and is not useful for quick backup restores. I'd rather have my data mirrored to a competitor like Rackspace Cloud Files.
Anyone have some suggestions on a simple and robust way to facilitate this kind of mirroring in an automated way on a Linux box?