I recently had a hard drive failure on our Linux server, due to negligence and stupidity on my part I only had a handful of things backed up. when this happened I grabbed another 40 gig drive ( I have a stack of them that were failed video raid drives, go figure they would fail again) reinstalled all the programs and began the painstaking endeavourer of configuring everything. I also ordered a new 120 gig drive I installed it in my Linux server and created 3 40 gig partitions , /backup /spare /winfiles (the last being fat32 formatted while the former 2 Linux fs3) this is all on mandrake 10 distro.
what I need is for someone to lead me in the right direction from here, I would like to set this up so it is redundantly backed up so if and when it fails again i can just point lilo or grub or whatever to the other drive and be back in business, I would also like the backup drive to stay current with as little input from me as possible. so if anyone knows what packages I need to install or how to set this up please reply and thanks in advance for any help, also if you need to know anything else about my system or what I’m trying to do feel free to ask. I am new to Linux so I probably haven’t provided the details you need, thanks again
jimp

I created an easy (simple) shell script, that backs up all important things. I then ran it as a cron job, and it works wonders for me. I suggest you do the same for you. But to do this, you must first organize your drives in a logical order, for the script to be small and simple. This way you can copy all the files, or all new files to the backup directory(partition) and if all fails, be back in business with copying the data back to the original partition. You could go for RAID, but this is too much for me, because I have never done it (with only one harddisk, no use for that).

Hope you find some sense in this!

Good luck!