Hey all, I picked up a few cheap 400gb SATA drives this past friday. One of them is going in my slack box. That box currently serves as my Web, IMAP, SMTP, and file server. Currently I have three disks in the system. Disk 1 is a pata 120gb, disk two is a pata 200gb, and disk three is the 400gb SATA.

Right now I am thinking about using disk one as the system drive. Disk two would be used to store my email files, as well as the apache root, and my shared files. I am unsure of the correct way to get this all done properly. One way I thought about doing it was mounting the drive in /mnt/hdb and placing all my files on the drive, and symbolically linking the folders to the /mnt. So /mnt/hdb/www would be linked by /www, would this be the proper thing to do?

Or should I try to partition the drive for each application? That way /dev/hdb1 would be mounted to /www then /dev/hdb2 would be mounted to /mail and /dev/hdb3 mounted to /files.

The fourth and largest disk would be used strictly for backups. I currently have no backup scripts running, I used to have a crude one I made, but I changed some things and have not brought it back online. My email is of utmost importance to me, as I do a lot of work though it, and all my receipts and stuff are there as well. I would like to have it somehow copy each email I receive to a different computer, so I could switch and not loose anything. However if thats not possible does anyone have any good backup scripts for email that I could run at least once a day if not more?

Thanks,
Archer36

[One way I thought about doing it was mounting the drive in /mnt/hdb and placing all my files on the drive, and symbolically linking the folders to the /mnt. So /mnt/hdb/www would be linked by /www, would this be the proper thing to do?]No.

If I understand you (you are imprecise), you would create symbolic links in /mnt directory to directories in /mnt/hdb1 ?? The result is that browsing /mnt will show a lot of folders. In other words, /mnt/hdb1/www/ would be accessed from /mnt/www not /www

You create a mountpoint at /mnt/hdb1 and "bind" /mnt/hdb1/www (see mount man page) to a directory created at /www to get that effect.

However, creating directories off root is not good practice. It's better organization to keep user defined directories in user areas. How about:

/usr/share/www or /home/share/www, /home/share/files and /home/share/mail.
If you do not intend others to use them, then better ~/mail ~/files and so on.
You can create symbolic links in your home directory to these too... maybe. If your browser would normally use a hidden directory like .mail, turn that into a symbolic link to /usr/share/mail perhaps? You see the possibilities?