So, I'm running RedHat 7.3 on a Dell computer and I'd like to be able to back up student (user) home directories. I'm more than a little confused after looking at the HCL. Anyone have experience with doing this and if so, would you like to recommend a hardware configuration. There's about 40 gig of stuff on the server, but the home directories are much smaller than that.
If you want completely automated offline backups then your best bet is usually a stand-alone tape robot that allows network access. These boxes tend to be fairly pricey, but they're probably the most economical way of handling really large (as in terabytes) backups as they will generally span accross any number of tapes automatically. Unfortunately to keep these backups secure you still normally have to take them out of the tape robot after the backup is done.
If your backup will fit on a single tape then just about any any SCSI tape drive will work (to date I have never met either a tape robot or a SCSI tape drive that didn't work with Redhat).
For cheaper completely automated backups you can use one or more IDE drives (which may be accessed over a network). The major disadvantage here being that your backup is online all the time, hence it's possible for someone who has root access on the appropriate box to destroy your backups.
Auto-fed CD/DVD-R is also a possibility, but I wouldn't do it unless you're sure you can backup to a single disc. Disc loaders can be both quite expensive and quite unreliable. Also your backup script can get excessively complex (and start requiring large temp files) if you need to split your backup onto multiple discs.
Software wise I usually end up with is a short shell script that calls tar to do most of its dirty work and runs from a cron job. When writing such a script make sure you keep in mind that if you're sending a backup which contains /etc (particularly /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow) over a network you either want to be _REALLY_SURE_ you can trust the entire network or you want to encrypt the data (e.g. use scp or connect to the destination machine using SSH port forwarding).
You can also use Amanda, but you need to be careful with it (serious security issues if you're on an un-trusted network and it likes to use dump, which doesn't work properly with new Linux kernels).
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