On Friday, December 24, 2010 06:40:06 am Ryan Wagoner wrote: > LVM is just like the name implies a logical volume manager. It allows > you to easily combine and carve space from physical disks. It doesn't > provide any redundancy. If you want redundancy you either need to use > the LVM mirror capability, linux software raid with mdadm, or a > hardware raid card. It's been said before, and never seems to be said often enough: backup your data! IMHO, very few people really need RAID. In many (most?) cases, the added complexity of RAID is as likely to cause an increase of failure rate similar to or greater than the reduction of failure rate caused by the resiliancy of hardware. RAID won't protect you if you issue a perfectly legitimate command to delete data that was made in error. I once thought I needed RAID, and since realized the error in my ways, finding that the cases where RAID helped (one!) was vastly outnumbered by the cases where it made no difference (10? 11?) or actually worked against me. (2) Now, I don't bother with RAID even though my needs have grown from one server to 16, instead providing redundancy at the machine level: if a server goes, another picks up the load, in most cases automatically, in near-real-time. I can do this because I host a custom-made application with these objectives carefully designed for. The MUST HAVE option: a backup! Backups provide real, multi-point redundancy, some protection against the "Ooops, I didn't mean to delete that file" scenario, etc. and are there when all else has failed. I'd happily point you to my set of scripts that coordinate disk-to-disk backups over a network with automatically expired snapshot points. http://www.effortlessis.com/thisisnotbackupbuddy. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.