Therese Trudeau wrote:
Explain your definition of a mission critical desktop. Does the entire enterprise stop functioning if this desktop stops? I am THE tech support for my company, but my desktop could die right now, and although I would be heartbroken and a little peeved, I could just fire up my lappy and get back to work in a few minutes. I usually have 2 desktops running, just in case I need to put out fires while my main desktop is doing the windows reboot dance.
If my linux machine stops functioning it's not as bad as the windows box going off line, but it still takes a day or two to get things back on line with the linux box with all the software I installed on it.
If the windows machine stops functioning, then yes it's a pain, it's at least two days by the time I get back up and running because much of my work is graphic design and that's where all my adobe stuff is loaded on, and it takes a long time to get the OS re instlled, then grabbing my data, and re installing many many software applications etc.
Because I am a one person company I just don't have time to spend days getting a machine back on line, and it's happened more than once. An hour or two however to get things runing again would not harm my work flow that much.
If you want to keep things simple, I'd recommend getting an external drive or two and burning a copy of clonezilla-live from http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live/. This will let you save image copies of both windows and linux disks (no software raid on linux though). Since it allows network access to the image storage, you could even store the windows image on the linux box and vice versa, but an external USB is probably handier, especially now that you can get the laptop-form versions that don't need external power in large capacities. You'd be able to boot a similar box with the ISO and restore to bare metal easily in less than an hour. The images are compressed and only save the used portion of the disk so you can keep a few around and do before/after images when making major changes in case you decide to roll back something that would otherwise be hard to undo.
I'd do this for the system drive and repeat the image copy only after updates. Then I'd put all of my own work on a separate partition (probably a software RAID1 mounted as /home on the linux box and samba-shared to windows) and periodically rsync the contents to an external USB/firewire drive. Depending on the value of this work, I might have multiple external drives that I'd rotate offsite.