[CS-FSLUG] Would someone take pity on me?

[Nathan T.]

I've always found backups on the same computer not to be very
dependable, burning to CDs or DVDs is a nice cheap alternative to this
but with blanking the disks and burning them again you soon find it
takes a long time to do backups, especially if you have to filter
through files so you only get the ones you want.

The best solution I've ever come across, and this is what is done in
schools, is to have a file server. It doesn't matter whether you
upgrade the OS on your computer, or whether it dies, your important
files are stored on the backup server which hopefully has RAID 1 with
two or better yet, three drives.

The server alternative is expensive, but if you happen to get an older
computer you don't think is good for much and you have some spare hard
drives around, consider putting a light Linux distribution on it.
After that you just need to set up your /etc/hosts.allow and
/etc/hosts.deny files to block anything that isn't coming from inside
the network, then just disable unnecessary services ("daemons") and
you're set. Setting up network servers should be fairly
straightforward with a distribution like SUSE which was designed with
that kind of thing in mind.

Anyway its just an idea.