[TriLUG] RAID newbie question...

[rasch at raschnet.com]

On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 01:53:26PM -0400, Chris Merrill wrote:
> The other RAID thread got me thinking...my home server finally has enough
> important stuff on it to be worth doing some sort of backups (IOW, I'm not
> just playing around, anymore).
> 
> However, I have a strong (and possibly irrational) aversion to tape drives.
> Would a simple RAID IDE setup keep me backed up?  In other words, can I set
> it up to essentially mirror one drive onto the other?
> 
> I saw the following on eBay...would it suffice for my needs?
>   "3WARE DUAL IDE RAID CONTROLLER MODEL: 7000-2"
> 
> TIA,
> Chris
> 
> p.s.
> I realize that this would only protect me from hardware failure - not
> accidentally deleting a file that I really need.  Hardware failure is my
> primary concern, since it is running on old hardware (350MHz, 6G drive).

If you're mainly interested in backups and not just quick hardware
recovery (i.e. continued uptime on HD failure), then you should consider
rdiff-backup.  Rdiff-backup cretaes a hard disk based backup including
support for deleted, created files.  It saves a most recent snapshot and
backward delta-files to recreate the filesystem at the time of any
previous backup.  I run this on my servers nightly, even across the
internet.  It uses librsync so that diffs are calculated efficiently
using minimal bandwidth.  A backup of the changes to my 10 gig /home
partition takes on average of 10 minutes nightly over my DSL connection
to another machine I admin in Missouri.

http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/

David
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