My Parents have run a small publishing company out of the house my whole life and my interest in computers has coincided with the growth of said company.

This summer was my first summer home from school and I had been taking some server classes at the university. Once home I wanted to apply my new skills so I convinced my Dad that they needed a faster server for storing the large digital files and that I could install this server for very little cost using Linux. Well I did actually it was pretty easy considering this was my first time using Linux as more than a neat gadgetty OS.

Now then the samba share is set up to accept all transactions as the same user with full read write permissions. This may not be the way a real admin would set it up but hey i'm learning and I needed this to work quickly without buying software to tie the server into the windows domain.

The server is running Suse 9.1 Enterprise (Suse sent me the evaluation kit and I'm still using it). The hard drive configuration was a bit hard for me having never had multiple drives in a computer with Linux but here is how it goes.

\ or root is a 37gb WD raptor SATA drive
\wdhda or hard drive A is a 200gb sata drive
\wdhdb or hard drive B is a 200gb sata drive

Now the server is running fine and god help me if I ever have a problem with it because i'm almost totally in the dark when it comes to trouble shooting linux. So that brings me to my problem.

I need to backup the files on Hard Drive A to Hard Drive B! If anyone knows of a good way of doing so using free or inexpensive hardware or software please let me know. I also have a 200gb USB drive that I couldn't make linux recognize so I gave up on using that.

Basically I need guidance here because I do not want this server to not be getting backed up. I should mention that a RAID array to mirror the drives is possible but I have never attempted and would like to make this a last resort as I am afraid of data loss.

I forgot to mention the hardware other than the Hard Drives if that is important let me know.

I also needed to add that the Windows Server not only runs the domain here but its set up as the DHCP, DNS & Active Directory server for the domain. It is currently handling file sharing requests as well for an order keeping utility that runs on all the client workstations for order processing.

You have a couple of choices. You can just synchronise the data between the two machines using rsync. The downside to this is that you overwrite the files each time, so if you damage a file, the backup runs and only then do you realise you need the file, you're scrod.

The biggest problem I have recommending a solution for your problem is the fact that both disks are the same size. In the beginning while you don't have much data, you can do incremental backups to the other disk using something like Bacula (which rocks, by the way ) The problem comes in as time passes and the disk fills up. You'll only have enough space on the other disk for one copy, so you can't go back X days.

The other problem you have is that both disks are in the same machine. If the machine is stolen, catches fire, gets abducted by aliens, etc, you lose both copies of your data. That might not be what you want

Thanks for the ideas,

I know this isn't the ideal corporate system but heh it was budget. I did what I could and plopped as much power and space in as I could. We deal with large files and the old server had only 80gigs that was constantly full. The new server has already accumulated 55gb and has only been operational for 5 months. I expect to upgrade the machine with larger capacity drives but for now I need bi-weekly backups to be taking place.

With the 2 drives and that much data, I would do RAID1, probably software RAID1. Pretty easy to setup. If the data is important, backup on an external drive and store off site.

Perhaps you could look into tape backups with say DLT, these can store 40 - 80 GB per tape and are quite quick, and the prices are very resonable for second user units on ebay.

TAR/DUMP can be used to backup the required files/directories. e.g. tar -cvf /dev/st0 /etc /var/log

Or you could try installing the drive on the win box, my home system runs that way, I have a permanant fstab entry that links to a share on a win server, and then just copy the required files to the share and back up from there. (Also 2 win xp machines backup to the same machine) although you would need a large amount of disk storage on the windoze box, but this could be an added layer of redundancy....

Some ideas anyway good luck...

What I do is use rsync, as has been suggested before, to a separate hard drive for my data... this keeps it as a fully sync'ed copy (which I run as a cron job every 15 minutes)... then I use tar to back up the data to a directory on the second hard drive every week, so I have a static copy to go back to in case I have a file deleted that I need to restore. Then, I have another cron job that runs a tar copy every month (on the first) that does the same thing... so, I end up with three "copies" of my real data directory... one that is totally kept in sync in "nearly" real time, and two to go back to to find files I may need older copies, or copies when a file was accidently deleted. So far, that has been working for me! (This assumes a LARGE hard drive to keep this many copies of my data... but large IDE drives are cheap these days!