Anyway, it was planned and then executed within a few days, but here's what I did.
I finally came together with a more coherent backup plan, after I stayed up late one night installing backup software after an epiphany that I had just done what I did before, say "I'll get backups in place later" and later never came. So I decided to start right then and got something going, but it wasn't complete. It was enough that if disaster struck the wiki and a few other things, I could recover quickly, but there's more on that server than the wiki.
So I thought about it and came up with a better plan, which led to rethinking the partitioning and user quotas (or lack thereof), which led to a need to rearrange the partitions, and in an effort to improve performance I went with reiserfs, which is supposed to perform better than ext3, which it had before. The kernel's compiled with profiling support now, and I rearranged physically the hard drives so that the main hard drive doesn't share the cable with anything else. So hopefully in a few days I'll be able to look at some serious reports that'll tell me where the bottlenecks really are.
The backup plan required that I have some way to backup the /home partition, and previously the /home partition was set to <some large size> and allowed to grow to its limit. This isn't very good for a partition that *must* be backed up, so I decided to setup quotas on it, which required it not share a spot with anything else, because there's another partition that has to be allowed to grow to its limit. While I was at it, I pulled out some other partitions from / in an effort to improve stability in general (my server was most stable when /var, /usr, and /tmp were all on their own partitions, and this wasn't the case when I moved it over to gentoo).
So, now I have the partitioning taken care of and the server won't be taken down again. The rest of what I'm working on can be done without having to take it down for any period of time.
In the longer term, after the semester's over and I receive my next paycheck I'll be building a real backup server. In the meantime, I freed up 51GB on the other hard drive to use for backups. Not enough for long term backups, but enough for disaster recovery, provided the disaster isn't fire or flood.
So I'll be putting together a better backup plan after this one is done, but I'll have a better server in any case.
