Hey All,

I have a few questions about formatting and mounting my hard drives for a backup system that I'm aiming for.. I am running Debian Squeeze, and I have 3 hard drives installed; a 60gb for the OS/pkgs, a 2tb for data storage (we'll call it 2tb A), and (another) 2tb (we'll call 2tb B) for synching/copying the data from 2tb A.

Basically, I will be running a server that setup as a web server and a streaming server. I want to stream my movies, music, pictures, etc. to my TVs, computers, laptops, and other devices. And, I'd like everything from my other computers to be saved directly to the server, which I assume will be saved in the /home directory/partition under / (root)... ?

Well, where ever it is saved, I would like it to be on hard drive 2tb A. Then I plan to setup a script that will automatically mount hard drive 2tb B, sync with 2tb A and copy the data, then unmount. And, it will do this periodically.


Now, my thoughts and questions...

Here is what I'm thinking and am looking for opinions/a direction to take... /home is located/mounted under /. Since this is where all of my data will be saved to/located, I figured I'd mount hard drive 2tb A to /home. Then all of the user(s) stuff will be backed up when 2tb B syncs with A.

**But, if I run an FTP server or something that uses "user profiles" for its setup I don't necessarily need to back up the "user profile." Which is what would happen if I mount 2tb A to the /home directory, correct? Would it be wiser and would I be able to have all my data saved to a completely different directory (something like /alldata) and let the programs access it from there?**

After mounting hard drive 2tb A to /home (or where ever) I thought I'd have 2tb B mount to a created directory called /2TBbackup. Then, with the help of the script(s), it would copy everything from A then unmount itself until the script kicks back in at the next interval. Does this seem correct? Am I on the right track with this?


As for formatting, the files are all located on a NTFS formatted hard drive right now. Once all of the copying testing is done, I plan to transfer everything to 2tb A. What should I format 2tb A as? ext3,4? NTFS as well? If ext3,4... will I have problems tranferring the data from my external NTFS hard drive to 2tb A?

Then, I'd like 2tb B to be NTFS. In case the server goes down/fails or if I just give it up one day, I'd like to be able to just pull 2tb B out of the computer and hook it up externally (or internally) to a Windows PC so I can access all of the data. Is this possible? And, if I do format it as NTFS, will I run into issues with syncing/copying from 2tb A when it mounts itself and does it back up?


Any and all help is appreciated, and sorry for the long post, lol. I wanted to make sure I got everything out there once though... Thanks in advance!

For the automation I would take a look at cron scripts. It would let you specify when you wanted a task started and done automatically. After the scipt is made it just starts at the specified time.

As for formatting. Linux does have ntfs support but at times it can be kind of spotty(I have lost data before but not sure if it has gotten better). I personally use XFS but ext4 should be very good for what you want to do. The only problem is that it may be difficult to access it from a windows pc(direct access not server access).

Maybe another poster could recommend a good way on how to safely transfer data. I have had a few mishaps when transferring from ntfs to linux formats(a few years ago). The only reliable way I was able to transfer was through my network but that takes a lot of time.

Thanks! Cron is actually what I plan to use. That has been the most widely suggested to me, lol.

As for the formatting/transferring, have you encountered these problems when hooked internally? Or have you experienced this problem with external hard drives hooked up by USB as well?

I lost data when my drive was connected externally through usb. I haven’t had a chance to try an internal setup while transferring.

NTFS is sufficiently different that such things as ownerships and perms may not be preserved; also Linux Filesystems are case sensitive, unlike NTFS.
You could try mounting as Samba shares.

Ah. Sucks to hear. For both your loss and my ambitions, lol. Thanks.

I planned to use something like Samba or Samba itself to do that so that all of my computers can save data directly to the server and not take up space on their local hard drives. I don't know much about it yet, but will this help me if the server happens to fail?

About the permissions and such being preserved... is this likely to happen even if I have the "ntfsprogs" and "ntfs-3g" packages installed?

How about rsync?

rsync -gloptrunc $srcdir $dstdir

I think it may even help with the NTFS problems. Have a look, we use it to backup our production hosts. The best thing about it is it only transfers files that has changed and does not use much reasorces.

Yeah, I plan to do some research into this and cron. As far as I have been told, I am going to be using rsync to copy the data and have 2TB B match 2TB B. Then cron will be used to schedule 2TB B to mount, use rysnc to sync with 2TB A, then unmount. However, I did not know it could have an affect on what types of files it is transferring. I will look into it very soon to see what I can find out.

Thanks!