Building a Backup Server

I’m building a mini-server to backup all of my network pc’s here at home. Things I’ve done so far:

1. Installed Xubuntu – I intended on installing Ubuntu server but couldn’t get it to boot. I downloaded the image and verified it – burned it on 2 different disks but no luck. So, I grabbed an Xubuntu disk I had laying around and installed it. I figure I can remove some of the extraneous stuff when I am complete.

2. Setup OpenSSH, SMB, etc. Wow, what a task. Thank god for the Ubuntu forums – specifically the tutorials section.

3. Followed these tutorials:

Setup Samba first:
HOWTO: Setup Samba peer-to-peer with Windows

Start rsync backups (so far I’m backing up my “main” Ubuntu PC and an Apple. 3 Windows machines to be setup to do backups too.
HOWTO: Backup nightly via rsync – Ubuntu Forums

Finally – setup “fake” raid for new big drives:
HOWTO: Linux Software Raid using mdadm

This all started as part of a project that I was inspired by in Linux Format Magazine which in the May issue had an article about building a media server/NAS using Ubuntu. It just so happens that I had a spare motherboard, case, power supply – all I really needed was a few big ass drives. Now I’m in the final stages of setting up the RAID array using RAID1 which is mirroring for hopefully fail-proof backups.

So far the only hiccups I’ve had were in getting the OS installed using the Ubuntu Server image.

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