If you’re read my posts recently, you’ll have read that my home Linux server died when it’s hard drive decided to not play anymore. Luckily I had a complete image of the machine so I could restore it, but the image was 1 year old, and subsequent database backups had not been successfully copied onto the Zip drive, meaning I lost 1 year of database changes.
Starting with new drives, I decided to investigate a RAID 1 setup with duplicate drives, which appears to be working well so far, although I haven’t deliberately removed a drive to test for sure that the mirroring is working, but I will test this shortly. To avoid losing backup files in the future, I purchased the Online file Folder service from GoDaddy and have mounted the drive using WebDAV over HTTPS. Incredibly, the mounted drive just appears as it is a local drive, and through my weekly cron backup script I can copy the back up files directly to this mounted drive. Very cool.
Instructions on setting up davfs2 for the WebDAV support on Ubuntu is here. The instructions are for box.net, but they work with GoDaddy’s Online File Folder service too.