What logs etc do I need tocheckfrequently?

[C. Ulrich]

On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 16:30, Massimiliano Stucchi wrote:
> So why not use a cheap IDE RAID controller and do RAID1 ? I think it
> would be much safer, and reduce the amount of time needed to restore the
> system once a hard drive fails. We use RAID1 with a spare drive on our
> web and email servers here, and there's no downtime each time a drive
> fails, having put all the drives on hot-swap bays on a promise fasttrack
> controller.
> 
> Greetings

You could, and it would definitely give you an increase in the
availability of the machine as you mention. One disk goes down, simply
mount the good one and press on. What it doesn't give you, however, is a
proper backup solution. Backups protect not only against disk failures
but also mitigate the following:

* Accidental or hasty deletions

* Security compromise

* Catastrophic overall system failure (such as a power surge that takes
out everything connected to the motherboard). This, of course, depends
on the backups being isolated from the system, which mine currently are
not.

RAID will not help you in any of these situations. My incremental backup
solution allows me to retrieve an exact copy of the contents of the file
server as it looked at any point in time, from when the very first
backup was made (about two years ago) to the present. This has saved me
more times than I care to remember.

Charles Ulrich
-- 
http://bityard.net