Linux Server (NAS)

[oimi]

Yeah, I don't know whether I said before but I have been prioritising with my degree work over this project. I have 4 days before my independent study is due in... then more work to follow.

[mycarsavw]

Yeah, I don't know whether I said before but I have been prioritising with my degree work over this project. I have 4 days before my independent study is due in... then more work to follow.

School before play?

Come on man, play comes first, every time!

(good luck with the degree - hopefully it'll go to plan)

[oimi]

Thanks for the best wishes.

I'll find out in September whether it all went according to plan, for the past 3 years it has always been work before play.

I do really want to get this server up and running, I've got a lot of important work and music to keep backed up and my other machine is starting to make funny heat-related noises...

[peterb]

Ive built a couple, recently, both using Mini-itx boards. One uses a couple of 2.5" drives and a hardware RAID card for RAID one - and backs up across a lan to another machine that has a tape drive in it.

However I just built another one using a mini-itx board with a pico PSU and a couple of 3.5" drives using software RAID (mdadm) for mirroring (RAID 1) This has one main partition which is configured for LVM with logical volumes for /var and /home. Tthere are some other logical volumes as well - created for specific file storage - photos etc - using LVM allows me to resize them easily so that the content fits on the backup device, an Ultrium 2 tape drive (the expensive bit!) This all runs under Fedora Core 12.

In addition to the books I referred to earlier in the thread, you may want to look at "Fedora Linux" by Chris Tyler (O'Reilly). Although based largely on Fedora Core 6, the principles haven't changed (my copy is very worn!) with successive releases. Googling man LVM and man mdadm will give you a comprehensive (but dry!) explanation of the various features of those applications.

[oimi]

Sounds interesting, but I am amazed you are using tape drives.. I didn't think anyone did these days.

They are expensive, use a primitive recording medium (unreliable, like VHS and floppy disks because of physical contact when writing) and take a long time to produce a back-up.

[peterb]

Sounds interesting, but I am amazed you are using tape drives.. I didn't think anyone did these days.

They are expensive, use a primitive recording medium (unreliable, like VHS and floppy disks because of physical contact when writing) and take a long time to produce a back-up.

Tape is proven, reliable, portable, compact and fairly robust. But what would you use as a backup medium?

Do a search on Ultrium - tape is by far and away the cheapest running costs per byte, and stored correctly, give good longevity and reliability. They are also compact - compare the size of one Ultrium 2 tape with around 70 DVDs, or an Ultrium 4 tape with 140DVDs. For large storage requirements, you can use tape auto-changers - but that is getting into really expensive territory - used in corporate applications. An Ultrium 2 tape cartridge is under £20 for up to 400Gb storage (compressed)

(If you are interested in a Linux application that uses tape auto loaders - look at Amanada which will centrally backup (to a tape auto-loader) many machines on a LAN - automatically, changing tapes as required.)

www.amanda.org