better disk reliability on a desktop machine

[Nick Barnes]

I've been running FreeBSD on servers and on my desktop since about
2.2.2.  My current desktop machine is set up for cvsup, although I
haven't done 'make buildworld' for a while (uname says 4.9-RELEASE).

I don't have any good backup system in place for this machine.  I was
thinking "it's just a desktop".  But these days it does have a
boatload of personal data on it (e.g. digital photos).  So shoot me.

My main disk (ad0: 114473MB <ST3120022A>) is having hard errors.
Shoddy rubbish: I've only had it a couple of years.  Past experience
suggests that it's going to take me three or four days to sort this
out (get a new disk, recover what I can from the old one, repair the
OS installation with cvsup/buildworld/installworld, repair packages
and ports in a similar fashion, figure out what's missing from my
files and scratch around in my inadequate personal backups to recover
what I can).

I don't want to have to do all that ever again, after this iteration.

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?

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?

Nick Barnes