Not much simpler. Replacing my disk as described above was literally 4 commands from bash. And zero reboots. And less error prone? Are you joking? In a non-mir

Not much simpler. Replacing my disk as described above was literally 4 commands from bash. And zero reboots. And less error prone? Are you joking? In a non-mirror system you have to re-partition and set everything up the way it was, you have to really hope you copy things back correctly (do you have a bunch of hard links? Does cp copy them correctly? What's that option to rsync again? Do you have enough memory to copy hard links correctly? Are xattrs going to copy correctly?). Sigh. On top of that all you can't actually use that disk while any of this is happening. Grrr, and it's going to take 11 hours to copy 5 TB of data back (at 125MB/s)! If you're perfectly happy with your computer being out of commission for 11 hours, be my guest. Also, when the old disk is removed from the mirror set, it's a complete image copy of the data. I'm not sure why you think that isn't the case... Seriously, making every disk in your computer a mirror set is really a phenomenal idea. I've been doing it for years now and every time I have to upgrade or replace a disk it's made it heavenly. You shouldn't pooh pooh it until you've actually tried it.