What would be good for a harddrive for backup? I had a disaster happen yesterday. I had a script totally mess up and delete all free user accounts. Would a simple eide harddrive be good setup to backup the first harddrive everynight at 12Am be good enough? How would I have it setup. Do most motherboards that take scsi also take eide?

it works, you can just setup a cron job to either copy dirs or tar.gz the dirs and copy the tar.gz over to the 2nd hdd, it should work.

Do you need a special adapter to go from scsi to eide?

probably, i'd just use 2 IDEs, much easier, just plug them in and setup the things i said up top

Originally posted by ClusterMania
Do you need a special adapter to go from scsi to eide?]

Probably not, I don't know any SCSI mainboard not featureing IDE too.

rsync at 4 Am is the best way to do it? How do I restore the first harddrive from the second if something messes up?

Why dont you use a Raid array?
user raid 1, that mirror 2 drives, you could get one for less than $250.
Its not hard to setup either, the main problem would be that you need 2 empty drives. (if i remember right, if someone has more info/corrections about this please post)


Cheers,
Apoc.

Originally posted by Apocalypse
Why dont you use a Raid array?

Maybe because RAID has nothing to do with backup?

Originally posted by Apocalypse
Why dont you use a Raid array?
user raid 1, that mirror 2 drives, you could get one for less than $250.
Even if he had an array (especially a mirror), he would have two drives with none of the data that he wanted on them. If they get deleted off the first one, they'll be mirrored and deleted off the second.

Either get a second hard drive or use another machine's hard drive. In either case, rsync works wonders -- seriously consider using it versus just copying or just tar.gz+copy.

How do you configure your rsync to backup to another HD? Does it compress the archives? Do you need a cronjob as well?

I'm new to rsync and considering it seriously.

Take a look here:

http://rsync.samba.org/examples.html

These are some nice scripts that should help you get you on your way. There is one in there on backing up to a spare hard disk. Run man rsync for more information on how to use rsync.

Thanks, I'm on the site now...