Hi people

I am running my own server that hosts a few websites and services. My problem now is that I need to have some sort of a backup solution in case old Murphy should decide to knock on my door. First, I whipped out my old RedHat 7,3 Bible and read about backups there. I want to have a corned job that simply mirrors my hdd to another disc on scheduled times (preferably incremental) over say a week. The RH Bible suggested I use a program called mirrordir that supposedly could be found at mirrordir.sourceforge.net. Unfortunately, SF does no longer host that project by the looks of it. The URL is dead and searching Sourceforges website produces no results to indicate a difference. So...

Which would you say is the best sollution to my dilemma? Is there some other great programs out there to perform the task that I wish to do or could one simply use a tar, shell script, corn sollution that doesnt need a dedicated program? I would ideally want to have a solution where I could simply swap the discs and be up and running again in case something goes pearshaped. I have had a brief look at software RAIDS but it all seem very complicated and a bit over the top for myself.

Any suggestions are very much appreciated!

RAID isn't really a backup solution because it doesn't allow you to go "back in time" - it just gives you an extra copy of the current data. In my experience most data loss is caused by the user accidently saving over the top of a file with another, or deleting the wrong file.

I use a shell script with the rsync utility to mirror my home directory on my workstation and laptop, and on the workstation cron runs another shell script with tar to back up directories. Since rsync, tar etc. are installed by default on every Linux distribution I know that the system will work and that I will be able to read the tar archives whenever I need them.

Since all you need to do is save particular files to read later, a stupid and robust system like a shell script is probably the best choice. You can also tailor it specifically to your requirements, rather than being limited by the data formats and other quirks of your backup software.