Good evening all. I was hoping for a little advice on how to run an effective backup system. I have two machines. The primary has an Intel P4 cpu and a RAID 1 array. The backup system runs an Intel celeron and only one hdd. My goal is to have the backup be a perfect mirror to the primary server incase it crashes.

So, what would be the best way to accomplish this? Right now I only have two ideas. I could either
A. Use NFS to mount the directories from the backup machine to the primary, and run rsync on the primary which would essentially synchronize the mounted NFS folders with the primary server.
or B. Just run rsync over ssh on my lan.

These are what I need to backup: (the paths should be self-explanatory)
/home/*
/var/lib/mysql/*
/var/log/*
/var/spool/mail/*
/var/www/*
/var/www2/*
/etc/aliases
/etc/passwd
/etc/shadow
/etc/postfix/body_checks
/etc/samba/smb.conf
/etc/samba/smbpasswd

Is there a better way to keep a running mirror of my apache/postfix server? Or should I stick with Rsync? Thanks!

rsync is perfectly sensible, and if you don't want the
performance hit (ssh is CPU intense) you can (good
enough network security assumed) do it with normal
transports.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for the reply. I think I'm just going to use NFS to mount the backup directories onto the primary server, and use rsync to keep those mounted directories synced.

I'll be sure to post if I run into any problems