This might be more at home in the hardware forum, but I'm thinking there's a possiblity that the magic solution could be software based (?)
I'm looking to set up an Ubuntu + Samba file server with a data volume on RAID 1, and a seperate backup server to automatically create and serve up read-only snapshots of the data per this advice here:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
I'm not asking for any advice on the above FYI, I was just settin you up for my (possibly ridiculous) question to follow. (And posting that nice link for anyone else interested)
That ought to give me a decent amount of redundancy in the office, but just in case a meteor lands on the office, I'd like to have a really easy procedure in place for getting the data off-site occasionally. (About 800GB at the moment) If possible I'd like to make it so easy that it can be done without plugging a monitor into the file server. (and without me there
) In my dreamworld, I'm imagining that I can set up an external SATA port on the back of the file server and have a cron job run a script that will automatically make the magic happen overnight when a drive is plugged in. (I'm hoping that the previous sentence won't make you think I'm a total moron!) I would also like to email an alert of success/failure so that the "backup operator" will know when it's safe to unplug the drive.
Maybe I'm trying to make it too easy for them. (?) How would you handle off-site backups in my scenario? I'd be much obliged!
The people I'm setting this up for and an independent record company who have close to 1 TB of data that has been accumulated over the course of about 15 years. I'm thinking monthly backups taken off site will do. At any rate, it'll beat the pants off their current backup plan, which is "freak out!" I'm looking for an economic solution.. Thank you kindly in advance!
