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I have approximately 5, and soon to be 6 laptop hard drives that aren't being used at the moment. They are not the same size, so I'm not sure that LVM is the best case for this. I am looking to have the drives store backups, with redunancy, produced by my central linux server. [It's a small personal server with very few requests]. The type of backups that I'm looking to do is backuping up archieves [tar.gz files created via a cron script].

At the moment, all of the drives have a USB enclosure that sits on a USB hub.

Is there a tool that can make this easier to do, rather than creating everything via shell script?

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There's no 'best' way to do things but there's solutions that work better in some situations – Journeyman Geek Jan 26 at 2:08
Thanks! I had no idea that the term JBOD existed. I'm only familar with RAID and LVM configurations. – monksy Jan 26 at 2:39

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There's a few pieces to the puzzle. You have a JBOD, and want to treat it as a single unit - greyhole would work great for this. It exposes the drives as a single samba share, and lets you have redundant copies. I'd probably pair this up with rdiffbackup for efficient incremental storage.

Another way I can think of to do this would be to use inotify/incron to trigger a backup process to run. Have one master drive, and a series of scripts that backup to each other backup drive. Needs more setup (and testing!), but would probably work as well.

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Is there a way to prevent it from opening up a Samba share? I'm not really thrilled about using Samba. [All my OSes are linux] – monksy Jan 26 at 2:38
Unfortunately it entirely relies on that to work I think. I guess you could mount the share internally and expose it some other way. – Journeyman Geek Jan 26 at 2:39
Does this account for redundancy? If one disk fails, I'd rather not lose data. – monksy Jan 26 at 2:40
yup. Does redundancy. I have an idea for an alternate method but its not as elegant. – Journeyman Geek Jan 26 at 2:41
I'm going to go with the Greyhole route.. It sounds like a more mature option – monksy Jan 28 at 17:15
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I think Duplicity is what you're looking for. It works on local files but also over ssh/rsync and ftp.

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