Quote:
The only stuff that is truely irreplaceable would be photos and emails. Everything else you can in theory recreate. Just remember to also test your backups!

I'd add to that accounts and source code...

My photos are now taking up 30GB of my RAID5 drive, I'm either going to have to expand the drive sometime soon or start deleting MP3s.

The annoying thing is that I already have two extra 18GB drives to add to it, but before I can expand the array I have to:

- upgrade the motherboard BIOS
- upgrade some other bit of motherboard firmware
- upgrade the RAID card firmware
- upgrade the Windows driver for the RAID card

It isn't clear from the Dell docs which order these steps have to be done in...

It doesn't help that most of the upgrades have to be done from a floppy and that the floppy drive in the server is long dead.

What I should probably do is give up on the SCSI RAID5 array and just add a SATA card and three 200GB SATA external drives.

As to backup, I think I have said here before that I use a small mini-itx box with a 120GB drive in it at a friend's house, synced via rsync over DSL overnight. I've also recently added a 160GB drive to my desktop machine, so my data is now on the RAID5 drive on the server, a local mirror and a remote mirror. So I hope never to lose and data due to drive failure