[...]
So I'm thinking I probably want to move to a RAID mirror filesystem,
and keep some sort of quality backups offsite.
1. RAID mirror filesystem questions:
1a: should this be vinum? I have read and can follow the handbook
instructions for a vinum root filesystem.
1b: Will it help to upgrade to 5.x, to get this to go smoothly?
2. taking backups offsite. Seems to me that the best route is a
number of external firewire hard disks. This machine doesn't have
motherboard firewire, so I'll need to get a PCI firewire board.
2a: Recommendations for an affordable PCI firewire board?
2b: Should I upgrade to 5.x for the better firewire hardware support?
If you have to reinstall anyway, why not upgrade to 5 in any case, while
you're at it. Just an overall opinion unrelated to your technical
questions. And yes, at least for firewire, I'm quite positive that 5 has
far better support.
3c: Opinions on using firewire hard disks for this at all? Would I be
better off writing DVDs?
3. making backups.
3a: I'm used to dump/restore, but it seems to me that rsync might be a
better tool for this, as it would allow me to mount and browse the
backup. Opinions?
I used rsync for a while, and given your question, I would advocate for it.
Recently I discovered a backup solution that suits me much better:
subversion. Granted, backups are not what it was originally written for,
but I was intrigued by the ides of using a version control system for
backups, as I can easily back up and restore every change I make. I have
the subversion repository on an external HDD, and commit the changes
every couple of hours per cronjob, or manually if I make important
changes. The repository is backed up on DVD regularly.
Pros: Performs much better than rsync, and is more flexible, IMO. And of
course the possibility of using version control on all your files.
Cons: it was not trivial to set up, and if you have not set up a version
control system before, it can cause severe head-scratching (you have
been warned). Also, it uses twice as much space on the local disk as
before. I don't use the version control on my Multimedia collection, but
this changes slowly anyway and thus an occasional backup on DVD is
alright with me.
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