better disk reliability on a desktop machine

[Helge Preuss]

[...]

>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.