LinuxQuestions.org - Tale of Building a Linux Archive Server

One of the blogs I read on a daily basis has a little blurb on backing up and building a Linux-based archive server. If you're looking to take your backups more seriously, check it out:

"Linux Archive Server:

I've added the controller and three disks to the Linux box that has served as my workstation from time to time. It already has two 80GB IDE disks, a DVD-ROM drive, and a CD-RW drive. So I had to visit Fry's to pick up some power cable splitters. Luckily the case has a beefy power supply.

Using a Knoppix 3.6 CD, I've booted with the 2.6.7 kernel so that I can talk to the controller--my 2.4 kernel had no driver. I used cfdisk to put a primary partition on each, set the type to FD (Linux software RAID auto-detect), and created an /etc/raidtab that looks like this:

raiddev /dev/md1
raid-level 5
nr-raid-disks 3
nr-spare-disks 0
persistent-superblock 1
chunk-size 128
device /dev/sda1
raid-disk 0
device /dev/sdb1
raid-disk 1
device /dev/sdc1
raid-disk 2

Then I ran mkraid /dev/md1 to create the array. I built a ResierFS filesystem and let the array sync while I ate dinner.

From there, I ran an rsync to copy the data on the existing disks to the new array. With that done, I will wipe the the 80GB disks and create a RAID-1 array of them. It will house the operating sytem and home directories for the system. The larger RAID array will be mounted as /raid used to archive copies of files from my other machines.

Then I'll automate the process of using rsync to keep local copies of all my remote data on the RAID array. Given the available space, I'll likely use rsync snapshots to maintain several versions of each machine that I remotely clone.

The end result is roughly 460GB of usable space for backups and archives of those backups. Two years from now, I'll probably be able to swap in new disks to get 2TB of space for the same cost. And the old disks will still be under warranty."

More at the blog:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/003071.html