After the Great Crash of 2005 I decided to beef of my systems for backup and recovery. The last component was installed on Sunday. Let me give you the rundown of the setup:

The linux server (a.k.a. the green machine) has two new 200gig SATA hard drives. They are set up in a hardware-based mirrored RAID. The old hard drives were also mirrored but it was software-based. Under a software RAID the disks are formatted a little differently. When I was attempting to recover from the crash I had a hard time finding anything that could read the RAID with one of the disks missing.

Secondly, I set up a NAS disk hanging off my windows machine. Ok, ok, it’s not a *real* NAS, but it is an external hard drive connected to a networked PC. So I guess you could call it a Networked Area Storage.

Each night the critical files from the green machine are rsync’d to the Windows machine. Then each night the critical file from both machines are rsync’d over to the NAS. So at any given point I have multiple duplicates of just about anything.

Lest I not forget to mention the UPS I purchased just prior to the crash. It has already saved my computers on a few occasions.