Therese Trudeau wrote: > >>>> Don't bother. If you are a serious Adobe designer get > >>>> yourself a Mac and dual boot it between OS X and CentOS or > >>>> triple with Windows. > >>> Or use parallels or vmware and run all 3 at once when you want... and > >>> let the built in time machine tool do backups to an external firewire or > >>> network drive. > >> > >> Yes, even better. I think VMware sells a version of workstation for OS X > >> now too. > > > > Yes, and I think it will run VM's created under VMware server on linux > > or windows, although you may not be able to move them the other > > direction with some of the options you can use on the mac or windows > > workstation versions. > > I just called VMWare and the guy said that for what I wanted to do, > a bare metal restore solution, that I would be better served > by going with > either hardware or software raid maybe combined with something like > a tape backup solution, and that their desktop / workstation > applications are not suited as a complete backup - bare > metal restore solution. He said their system was mainly for taking > system snapshots for development purposes. The "bare metal" restore most companies tote is not as seamless as they lead to believe and often requires to be run on a "Server" version of Windows. I would follow Les' advice and use an imager program like clonezilla or Ghost and make a quarterly image and put it to an external HD and have a bootable USB memory stick or live CD with the software on it to restore the image if necessary. Ok for now, just get the cheap 3ware card you were planning as long as it'll be supported in the future. Get an external HD and download one of the free cloning packages live CDs. Clone your hardware mirrored setup to the external HD. Have the OS backup software perform nightly backups to the external HD. Then you have some hardware fault tolerance, and backups, as well as an image of your HD just in case and all for a lot cheaper then when you were talking complete redundancy. If your computer blows up, you can have another computer available, wait you do, your CentOS box... -Ross ______________________________________________________________________ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof.