Austad, Jay wrote: > Ok, with all the talk of buying huge hard drives and setting up huge > file servers, does anyone have any suggestions for backing them up? > Between me and my roomie, we have over 300GB of drives with data > that we'd rather not lose. Tape drives are expensive, and the cheap > ones only hold like 4 or 8GB worth of data per tape. Even if I did > find a cheap AIT drive, the tapes are still about $100 each. Organize your data into filesystem hierarchy that reflects the data's volatility. Things that change often should be stored in /var. Things that change only with system upgrades should be stored in /usr. Things that are stored regardless of their volatility should be stored in /home. Config files are in /etc. Temporary files are in /tmp or /var/tmp. You can do a similar hierarchy under /exports for your NFS/Samba servers. Or simply use symbolic links in your /exports directory to point to the more traditional directories. Now, back up your data in cycles that reflect the volatility and importance of the data contained within. Volatile and configuration information should be backed up daily. System software should be backed up in full when the system changes. (I do a dist-upgrade on my system, then back up /usr in full. I do upgrade to my system, I back up /usr in incremental.) The rest of the data should be backed up on a wide, periodical cycle reflecting the relative volatility of the data in the given filesystem hierarchy. Compute the amount of data that you have with respect to volatility and ask yourself what an acceptable buget is for backup hardware, software, and administrative time. If unattended backups are a requirement, CDR/CDRW is an unacceptable solution. If the amount of data being backed up will cost you more money in media and hardware than installing a RAID system, then ask yourself what your priorities are. -- ^chewie