external storage for linux

[Bart Silverstrim]

David Vincent wrote:
> hi list.
> 
> i'm looking at my options as i try to trim the number of computers i run 
> in the house yet retain some fault tolerance for my data.

The solution I use is:

A) my workstation (Ubuntu 7.10) has a 3ware card in it for hardware 
RAID-1.  Not cheap, but I have had good luck with 3Ware in the past.

B) I have 2 USB drives (Western Digital Mybooks), 250 gig each, attached 
to the workstation.

I don't have a "from bare metal" restore.  I keep my files organized on 
my system so 90% of what I keep is under ~/files.  I run "sync" to copy 
(via rsync) the data on ~/files to drive A.  The rest of my files I keep 
under a couple directories on drive A (so A has a A/myfiles, 
A/workfiles, etc.), and the sync script then does an rsync from A to 
drive B.

In other words, my sync script (more like a simple batch file) rsyncs my 
workstation's ~/files dir to A, then rsyncs all of A to B.  One drive 
dies, I have the second one to copy back from.

I could probably just slap sync into cron for nightly backups if I 
really wanted to...

-Bart