Backup solutions?

[Jon D. Slater]

Welty, Richard wrote:

>i suggest that you actually work out some requirements for your
>backup system ("not so paranoid" is a little light on the details).
>
>the usual concerns are things like this:
>
>natural disaster (fire? flood? etc.)
>
>man made disaster (theft? arson?)
>
>power or network failure (handling this implies remote site)
>
>archival requirements (do i need to go back in time?
>   how far back? how granular?)
>
>archival usually puts you into tape. remote backup site generally
>pushes you towards some sort of rsync replications solution.
>
>be aware that you can't simply rsync an rdbms, you need to do a dump
>and then restore or store the dump file as needed. alternatively,
>there are replication solutions for most rdbms systems (for both
>MySQL and PostgreSQL in the open source world, don't know about
>Firebird.)
>
>if you end up going archival with tape/cd/dvd, be sure to regularly
>check the media to make sure it works. i am aware of cases where
>the sysadmins made bad tapes due to a bad drive for months and months,
>assuming things were ok because the system didn't error when the
>tapes were cut. oops.
>
>richard
>
Hi Richard,

You are absolutely right...  I should have supplied more details.

My requirements are minimal.  I have two machines (1 - FC4, and 1 - XP) 
that I'd like to back up.

I don't need any archival on either machine.  My primary concern is hard 
disk failure.

FC4 box requirements:
The FC4 box is running several websites with accompanying mySQL db's.
The websites are all maintained under individual logins, under /home
Everything else on the machine could recovered easily enough, so the 
only backups would be of /home and the mySQL db's.

I've gotten the XP backup worked out.
I use the Windows backup utility to a mapped Samba drive.  (Which works 
fine for me.)  I do a repeating cycle of 1 complete backup followed by 6 
incremental backups, done daily.  Then I re-use the same files every 7 days.

In the event of a drive failure, I don't mind being down for a bit (even 
a few days), but I'd hate to lose any of my content.