Software Raid 5 (FC5)

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 10:18, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> As I've learned to my sorrow, no amount of RAID will protect you against
> a misplaced 'rm -rf'.
> 
> I would love to have a *real* backup of my music collection.
> Unfortunately, by "real" I mean some sort of relatively stable media
> that can be put in a safe deposit box or something -- i.e. a USB disk
> drive is out. 

Why? Ipods are pretty sturdy things and a laptop drive in a usb
case is approximately the same - or a full size drive if you need
over a hundred gigs.  The trick is to have more than one and rotate
them so you don't lose the data at the end of their expected
several year life.

>  To the extent that I've looked, tape solutions are just
> too damn expensive.

If it isn't too big, a dvd writer might be a solution.  My
preference is to have another machine on the network running
backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) so there is always
an on-line copy with at least a week of history in case you
accidentally delete something.  Then I periodically raid-mirror
that to an external drive that is rotated offsite.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com