Backup strategy comments requested

[Alan Cohen]

Hello

I'm looking for comments on a strategy I'm considering for 4 machines
running at my home business. Each machineJ requires only 1 disk called
"ProductionJ." GRUB is the bootloader. CLOSE to 24/7 availability is
important.  I don't want to use RAID. (My experiences with RAID1 were
bad and RAID is probably overkill anyway.)

In the event that ProductionJ is toast, the idea is to replace it with
DailyJ or WeeklyJ and re-boot. That's critical. In the event of
catastrophe, I don't want to be re-installing software.

My thoughts were to get 2 more disks for each machineJ, called "DailyJ"
and "WeeklyJ." "Daily" would usually be installed. A nightly rsync would
update ProductionJ's 9 partitions to DailyJ's 9 partitions.  Once a
week, DailyJ would have to be swapped with WeeklyJ.

Is this a good idea?

Known issues/questions:
- Changes to the /boot partition will undoubtedly be rare.
  How should they be made? dd?
  What are the position-critical files? I'm new to GRUB: is it just
  the "stage2" file?
- Changes to the MBR will undoubtedly be rare.
  How should they be made? dd?
- It's been suggested to use external USB devices to house DailyJ and
  WeeklyJ, in order to accomplish a poor man's hot-swappable disk
  scenario. (My assumption was to use "disk trays".) I have no
  experience with USB. Would this work? Do these USB storage devices
  contain quite ordinary looking IDE disks?

-- 
Sincerely,
Alan Cohen alan-bdq14YP6qtTV+N59fa8YiVaTQe2KTcn/@public.gmane.org voice: 416-783-9826
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