I'm currently managing a home server which has had a major problem: one of the disks in the LVM VG died. This disk was recently added and thus the recently saved data on the VG was unretrievable. I have copied the data from the first (remaining) disk in the LVM and I'm prepared to install the server from scratch.
The main purpose of this server is to act as a fileserver, but also as a media center and as fileshares for individual users. With this usage, I'm wondering how I should setup my disks in the system. I'm planning on having a Ubuntu 12.10 RAID5 (software) + LVM2 with raiserfs/ext4 setup of my disks, does this sound like a good idea? I basically want to be able to add new disks to the system in the future, and also be able to replace dying disks.
Apart from this, I'm also wondering how to do backups on such a system? I haven't fully understood if the RAID5 takes care of data retrieval in case of disk failure, but after this experience I would really want to be completely sure that the data is safe and stored; if the RAID5 would fail, I would still want to be able to retrieve the data from a backup. What would be the best approach to this?
I would like to thank you in advance, and I hope that you can help me! //Zeelia
