Building the Backup Server

Well, it's been a week since I switched to the new server, and there have been no problems. I had backed up the contents to my desktop hard drive just before the switch, so I'm ready to re-purpose the old server. It's going to become the backup server for everything else.

Long time readers will remember that the server only has an 80GB hard drive (plus a 7GB for the OS). How can I use that to back up 72GB on the file server, plus other files from the desktops, let alone save room for future growth on the 250GB drive? Well, I can't - at least not forever. But, I have a plan to get started, and I'll upgrade when I have to.

First, I'm not going to backup music files or podcasts. I have some of the music on CDs at work, and the rest I don't really care about that much. If I lose that Ted Nugent album, I'll live. The podcast directory is a temp folder at best. I move the files from the server to my MP3 player, and I only listen once. Cutting those two folders saves 20GB off the top!

Second, the software, backuppc, uses a compression algorithm. I don't expect much savings on the JPGs, but there may be a little on the rest of the files (maybe 20GB down to 5GB).

From the desktop PCs, I only plan to backup important configuration files, such as Thunderbird profiles. Anything else should be saved on the server, and the family knows that.

I'm starting by installing Ubuntu 6.10 Server Edition. I'll run through most of the same steps used on the file server, except for the Samba stuff. (We'll see.)

I'll report back after the initial setup is done - before the backuppc work starts.