If I were to get a server with dual 80GB hard drives, would it be possible to use one HD to simply mirror the other for backup purposes? If so, what is the best way?

depends on what you exactally want to backup. One of my servers runs dual 60gig HDs, and I use cPanel to run nightly/weekly/monthly backups of all accounts, and basic config files and such. If you are looking for exact/realtime mirroring, that would require a RAID configuration.

no i would have plesk on there, so would need to simply backup plesk and other important stuff.

Is it easy to do? How is it done?

Buy an ide raid card throw it in there and set it up for mirroring. Drive one goes boom swap it out and rebuild it. Wala your back up and running no data lost.

As discussed in other threads on this forum, raid and mirroring is not a backup solution. It provides redundancy in the case of a hard drive failure. What if a client deletes or corrupts a file. That will be mirrored to the second drive as well. No backup then. The second drive would work for backing up files, but I always prefer not to have my backups on the same machine, in the same data center. Just my preference though.

okay so then mount the 2nd drive as /usr/backups or whatever and make an iso image of the primary drive. you can store several images to roll back to whenever you want. you could also download the image and burn it to cd.

You can just run rsync to copy over changed files every 24-48 hours to your backup drive.. thats what we do.. we also have 2 HD's with the exact same Redhat installs on them and rsync everything except /boot over to the second drive every 2 days.. so if the main drive goes bad.. instant bootable recovery from HD 2.


You can also rsync the backups to another server, off site periodically as well.

RAID as stated isn't backup.. if you delete a file with RAID running.. its gone from both drives.. end of story... :)