[ale] Central server recommendations?

[laytonjb@charter.net]

Good evening gang,

I want to build a central server that is basically sort of a backup server. I want to
keep copies of data from the household machines. I've even thought about using
the machine as an NFS/CIFS server for the house. But, I really want to protect
the data as best I can. So with that said I'm looking for some recommendations:

1. Backups: software and/or hardware recommendations? The data is likely to
change fairly slowly. What about using DVD's for shorter term backup (less
than 2 years)?

2. RAID level? I'm not too worried about performance so perhaps RAID-6 or
RAID-51? Any comments or recommendations about these with mdadm?

3. Any hardware preferences for motherboard, etc? AMD dual-cores look too
cheap to pass up at this time. I'm not fond of Nvidia chipsets, but I can
easily pop in an Intel GigE NIC.

4. UPS recommendations? I would like something that will gracefully shutdown
the server if a power failure is detected.

Thanks!

Jeff