Ville — Thu, 16 Aug 2001 04:52:55 +0000

Thanks for the reply! I'll have to consider the options once I have the system (physically) up and running. Most likely I'll do a combination of both: take frequent (daily) full backups on a local separate hard drive, and back up critical files off site once a week.

From the recovery standpoint, if the RAID array goes bad, and I have a full backup of the system on a local hard drive, how difficult is it to recover the system once the RAID array is back up and running (but assuming that all the data on it was lost)? The OS probably has to be reinstalled (on the array), or can I just install the boot block on the array, refer to the backup, and go from there?

(Yes, I'm very green in administering a FreeBSD - or generally UNIX - box, but I'll learn quick ).

mairving — Tue, 14 Aug 2001 11:24:39 +0000

Ville, welcome to Webmaster-Forums.

Backup to another hard drive on the same system is one way of doing things but your best bet would be to keep a backup off site as well. To do an offsite backup you could tar and gzip it like so:
tar cvf - filenames | gzip > file.tar.gz #to compress into tar.gz. Of course, if you did this it would be quite a bit to download to your system but of that 5-10GB of space how many files are static and how many change. The point is again to have an offsite backup.

Other local backup options like dump and such are listed here on FreeBSD's site.