winscape 2342
I run all my important stuff on a Sun Solaris system wvolume manager to set up the raid 5- everything goes onto it; email archives, dvd images, mp3's, development trees, cm archives. 50 cents a gig before the raid overhead is the best price point I've found using 50 gig sca scsi drives. Rolling a 12 drive raid 5 system reserving 2 hot swap drives gives a reasonable amount of storage for $300 or so, with a fairly minimum cost of overhead.
(queue the PC weenies going on about the 250 gig IDE's)
Yes, we all know about them. Now buy two drives and mirror them and pay the 50% loss of total storage, or buy 5 to set up a basic raid system and wince when you lose 20% - 30% just to the raid parity plus another full drive for the hot swap. Not so cheap anymore, particularly if its just holding your personal stuff at home.
Having those hot swap drives cover for the dying storage has saved my rump a few times already as well (bad disks...)
I use such raids extensively on servers. My present POE has raids on all servers, and personally I have set up two raids for important personal...
For system recovery I do a flash archive if I want it back up fast. Since downtime is less important than simplicity on my boxes, I keep tar archives of system info so if a system bites it, then I can do a fresh OS install maybe or maybe not on new hardware and have the config there as reference and be back up in a few hours. Not a turnkey recovery, but quite robust- particularly 6 months later when you're a bit rusty on the system config.
At work I add nightly full backups onto 2 separate tape subsystems, easy to make it a cron job with weekly media checks, plus a hot standby server I dump server images to when I feel like it. You only need your butt saved once by a backup to make keeping them very tight a priority.
I leave Linux for the desktops, give me Solaris on SPARC for the servers. Windows crap isn't even worth backing up, just keep the data on the server...
De-fragging is the equivalent to dusting as a housekeeping chore. What it does is rearrange the "furniture" such that a sequential read of a file can be done optimally...
Dig it. I view the enterprise backup solutions with their more or less broken-butt interfaces as a contingency if the building burns down- otherwise not to be relied upon. Don't talk to me about Ghost.
Show me a sysadmin who isn't paranoid about their data and I'll show you somebody's servers that I WONT be putting my files on.
Gregm
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