Linux Journal: LVM and Removable IDE Drives Backup System

“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)…”

Complete
Story