Im taking over the lead IT position for my college's raido station.

Right now all the important files (music and otherwise) is not being backed up or anything.

There is a spare server right now that i want to use but i have one of two options.

Option A) Set up a backup server (running something like amanda) or something of that sort. Use this to make automated backups and then restore in the case of a failure.

The one problem with this is if the file server goes down there is going to be a large downtime especially if im not around.

Option B) Set up a replicating server that will be used as a failover. So it will be a clone of the file server and then incase something happens, we can just change the IP address of the failover server and it should be good to go.

It would have to do backup the file server automatically but not do failover automatically.

I have no idea where i would start with this one (asside from just building a samba server).

Im looking for some help and ideas to head in the right direction.

Thank you.

Definitely replicate the data to the other server. Start by looking at rsync. But also, if possible, backup the replica server to a removable hard drive or other media using cpio, tar, backuppc etc.