Nelson Minar just had a drive fail on his home Linux server and is contemplating the state of backup solutions.
He’s skipping RAID and instead going to a second time delayed rsync’d repository of information elsewhere on his home network.
Which is great, but doesn’t really go far enough. What if the house gets hit by electricity? Someone breaks in and steals his fancy looking computers? Or how about if a huge Foam party breaks out (he’s running Debian, this is more likely than you might think).
Given the extreme cheapness of the solution, I’d recommend at least contemplating storing some (if not all) of his important files out on Amazon’s S3. There is even a great little ruby app that makes this super easy.
Typical Debian operating environment