Disaster recovery recommendations for RH Linux 8.0...

[Ken Morley]

I have a RH Linux 8.0 server used to filter email for spam and virues.  It
receives email, filters it through SpamAssassin and ClamAV and then relays
the email to our Exchange server.  The email is only on the server for a few
seconds.

This server is critical and if it were to fail, I would have to get it
working again pronto.  I don't care about a handful of emails lost, but
reinstalling Red Hat, SpamAssassin, Clam AV, MIMEDefang, etc. is a lot of
work.  So, I'm looking for some "disaster recovery" solution to cover the
possibility that the hard drive fails.  I would want to be able to replace
the hard drive, quickly restore the last image and put the server back
on-line.

Can anyone recommend a simple, inexpensive solution that would allow me to
image the hard drive periodically and quickly restore to a replacement hard
drive?  I'm thinking that the backup media would probably be CD-ROM (the
entire installation is only about 800MB uncompressed).

I've used MicroLite's BackupEdge software on Unix/Linux servers in the past
and it is phenomonal for doing a "one-button"  recovery.  However,
BackupEdge is too expensive for this application.  Also, I don't know that
the replacement disk drive would be identical to the failed drive and I
don't know how BackupEdge handles restoring to a larger drive.  Can anyone
recommend a more cost-effective backup solution that can backup to CD-ROM
and has a "one-button" restore capability?

I may just buy two identical disk drives, install to one, image to the other
and then remove and store the "spare" drive.  Can anyone recommend disk
imaging software for this purpose?  I've looked at Ghost, but it doesn't
handle symbolic links and that would be a problem.

Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions!

Ken Morley