"When the company I work for, a civil engineering and surveying firm, decided to move all its AutoCad drawings onto a central fileserver, we were presented with a backup situation orders of magnitude larger than anything we had confronted before. We had at that time (now considerably larger) about 120,000 files, totaling 200GB, that were in active change and needed to be backed up at least daily.
"My first thoughts were of some sort of tape backup system, but as I began to research them, I was shocked at the prices I encountered. A tape autoloader large enough to contain our filesystem ran about $12,000 and a 40Gig tape was $89. When I first convinced my boss to let me run Linux on our servers, cheap was a big selling point. So, what are the alternatives?
"I had been using a removable 120GB IDE drive to transfer data back and forth from home; it had cost me $101 for the drive and $17 for the removable bay. I also had a retired 1GHz P4 box that had cost about $800--the math was starting to look interesting. If I could find a way to stick 120GB drives together, I would be home free. That's when I discovered Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager)..."
