[TriLUG] Raid gurus?

[Rick DeNatale]

On 3/16/06, WA Brown <brownwa at ftc-i.net> wrote:
> Would you be so kind to explain to me,a newbie, how to do this properly? I
> have a Redhat9-Apache2.0 server and one laptop and another
> desktop(winders)?A way to do it without having to shutdown the server and do
> updates on a regular basis?
>
> WA Brown

For backing up the server, take a look at Jeremy and Jason's slides
from their trilug presentation back in May 2004
http://www.trilug.org/talks/2004-05-backup/

For backing up the other machines over the network I use backuppc
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

I don't know if backuppc is packaged in rpm form, although I suspect
that it is.  I'm running Ubuntu/Debian and installing it as a deb
package was dead easy.

Backuppc allows several options for how to backup.  I'm using rsync to
backup my laptop, and samba for my wife's windows box.

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rick DeNatale" <rick.denatale at gmail.com>
> To: "Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list" <trilug at trilug.org>
> Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 10:11 AM
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Raid gurus?
>
>
> 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
>
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--
Rick DeNatale

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