I use to have something similiar to that mobile media tray that Zentara's link points to and it worked good (kind of a pain getting the drives in and out of the tray at least with the model that I used). But to tell you the truth the hot swap drives that come with the IBM X series servers are much much much easier (granted they cost much much much more :O). Either way you will need to umount the drive before you pull it out and the mount the next drive after you put it in. You can write a shell script that mounts the drive then starts the backup and then unmounts the drive for you. Do not foget to put the file system on each drive before you attempt to use it (using fdisk and then mkfs) Hope this helps. Jon On Tuesday 08 April 2003 11:44, zentara wrote:

On Tue, 8 Apr 2003 16:01:48 +0300 (EEST)

Jyry Kuukkanen wrote:

...

Hello

I have been asked to set up a Linux box that will handle backups of a Linux server using removable IDE discs instead of tapes. The actual location is somewhat troublesome when it comes to dust and hence no tape but hard-drive backup method.

I have the system setup on /dev/hda and runs fine, but what is required, harware or sofware wise, so that I could safely

A) remove slave IDE drive and replace it with another, while box is switched on B) mount /dev/hdc1 (if retuired: partition, mkfs.msdos etc.), rsync -a server::backupserver /path/to/hdc1 and then unmount the device C) jump to A) and repeat the process.

You might want to look at this: http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=GN210 Removable hard drive tray.

It says it's hot-swappable for win98, so maybe linux will allow the hot-swap. Maybe all you need is to umount it.