[CentOS] Backups on external USB HDD

Tue Nov 20 11:43:54 UTC 2007
Ugo Bellavance <ugob at lubik.ca>

Hi,

	I'm trying to implement this:

I have:

- A windows 2000 server
- A centos 4 server
- Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monthly.

The tape drive in the windows server died recently and I decided to 
switch to USB external drives.  However, the USB controller in the 
windows server is only 1.1, so it is very slow.

I didn't want to install a 2.0 USB controller in the windows server 
since it is a brand-name and I didn't want to make it unstable, so I 
decided to make the backups of the windows server (using Backup Exec) on 
the linux box.

So backup exec writes on the linux box via samba, directly on the USB 
drive. (I thought of writing on the linux box FS directly, then 
rsync'ing to the USB drive), but the space available on the local FS is 
about 90 gigs while the external USB drives are 250 gigs, meaning that I 
can keep like 4 weeks of data on the USB drives (using backup exec 
settings), while I could only keep 1 or 2 weeks otherwise.

My questions is:

-how can the USB drives be umounted/mounted automatically when the 
person on site changes it (monday to tuesday, for example).  There will 
always be only one HDD conected at the time.

Thanks,
Ugo