School me on server hard drive management. (Hot swap, SATA channels, LVM, backup, etc.)

[Richard Shaw]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 11:26 PM, linux guy <linuxguy123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 4) How should I approach data backup ?  Right now I have about 250 GB of
> nearly irreplaceable digital images.  RAID ?  Periodic backup to a (rotated,
> stored off site) hard drive via the hot swap slot in the case ?

My method is more complicated than most but probably less than some.

I run BackupPC on my desktop which backs up all the pictures and music
on my MythTV box as well as my wife's entire home directory. I also
backup my Documents directory (The backup data is stored on my system
drive and I use a dedicated home drive). At least that helps in case
of a single drive failure.

Then I have an external firewire drive I power on only for archiving
all of my backups about every 1-2 months and then twice a year I burn
all the critical stuff to DVD.

I also use SpiderOak as my "off site" backup of critical files since
they have a pretty nice linux client and 2GB free access.

Richard