[TriLUG] Raid gurus?

[Rick DeNatale]

On 3/15/06, John Broome <jbroome at gmail.com> wrote:
 nightly backups?
>
> 'cause RAID isn't for BACKUPS.

Amen bro!

For the edification and/or amusement of the followers of this thread,
here's my personal odyssey on backups/raid as a damp behind the ears
sysadmin for the household network.

I've got several machines here.  My first step was to set up a
disk-disk backup system for my main desktop workstation/server
following the presentation on backups which Jeremy P. and Jason T. did
a couple of years ago at a trilug meeting.  This does frequent
historical rsync backups of the important data on the server to a
separate drive.  This has already saved me from mishap and stupidity
on several occasions.

The next step was to backup my wife's Windows XP Home machine, and my
Linux laptop.  For this I use Backuppc which takes nightly backups
from these machines (or when the laptop is on the network if it wasn't
there at night).  These backups are stored on the server, and in turn
get backed up by the rsync based system I just described.

The latest step occurred after the boot drive on the server failed. 
This particular machine came with two 9GB SCSI drives and I later
added 2 180GB IDE drives one for the bulk of the data and the other
for the backup drive.  After the failure I realized that I hadn't been
using the two SCSI drives very intelligently.  When I'd originally
built the system using Redhat 9, it had used one of the drives for /
and /boot, and only put a swap partition on the other. When I
transitioned to Ubuntu, I had it use the same partitioning scheme. 
After replacing the bad drive and reinstalling Ubuntu, it only used
one of the disks and put / and swap in an LV.  I then, with the help
of the trilug list in general and Brian M. in particular, converted
the two SCSI drives to a raid-1 array.

The backups give me protection against both human and machine failures.

The raid array gives me reliability, and availability in the face of
another drive failure by letting the system degrade rather than fail
and letting me quickly bring the system back to normal operation after
replacing a failed drive.

---
Rick DeNatale

Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site
http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/