backup plan for home server
I'm in the phase of planning a backup strategy for my home server (mail,
web, wiki, documents, pictures) and I wanted to have the opinion of those
more experienced so that I don't discover I did something wrong when it's
too late.
What do I want to protect against:
- drive failure
- accidental deletion of files
What is available:
- two drives of 80 GB
- network storage on an external drive connected to a XP box.
Scenario 1:
- configure the two drives for software RAID
- weekly backup of unreproducible data (such as pictures) to the network
(tar or rsync?)
Scenario 2:
- weekly full backup of SYSTEM data to the second drive using a partition
backup tool such as partimage
- daily mirroring of PERSONAL data to the second drive using rsync
Things that I don't know:
- reliability of RAID. Is software RAID on Linux mature enough so that it
doesn't mess up the partitions?
- how do I find out that one of the RAID drives failed? schedule fsck
regularly?
- when one of the RAID drives fails, is recovery as simple as replacing
the drive, booting from Knoppix, and initializing the new drive?
- does partimage (or other partition backup tools) always backup entire
partitions or is there a way to exclude some directories?
I would really appreciate your feedback and ideeas coming from your own
experience.
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