Adam> o Are snapshots persistent across reboots? If not by default, can Adam> they be made to be persistent?
From what I know, LVM snapshots aren't that reliable, but I admit I haven't touched them lately.
Adam> o How many snapshots can I have at once? Bunches I think, but... Adam> Last year I took advantage of one of those occasional Tiger Adam> Direct ( shameless plug ;) deals to get myself a 200GB drive for Adam> 50 bucks. I am using the drive to backup my machines. Right Adam> now I backup once a month by copying the user data from my Adam> iBook, my wife's iMac, and my Knoppix laptop to the drive. Each Adam> time it comes to about 15GB total. I am beginning to fill the Adam> drive, so I want to design a more efficient way of using it with Adam> OSS tools. My plan is this: What some people do is use 'rbackup' which will only backup those files which actually change, and hardlink to the un-changed ones. This way each snapshot looks complete, but they're actually fairly compressed. http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ And google for "rbackup rsync snapshot" and you'll get more hits. Adam> o Acquire a cheap used PIII pc. Install the 200GB drive and Centos Adam> (for familiarity's sake, RHEL is one of the distros I use at work) sounds good. I've been looking to setup a main home file/backup/mysql/http server type device with lots of disk. But I want it to be *quiet* so I can just leave it on all the time and not worry about noise bothering people. Unlike my current do everything box which is loud. One of the Via EPIC boards looks nice, if it could hold enough disks to make a good RAID5 setup with hotspare. John