The catch is that I cannot add hardware to the system, no tape drives, no spare hdd's etc. So although I respect your opinions and options, please don't turn this thread into a discussion about them.
At the moment, I'm concerning myself with only one ide(p/sata) drive, tho we often use raid1 (shouldn't be an issue) and raid5 (I don't THINK it should be an issue). The arrays don't solve our problem for two reasons; all drives in an array could be damaged and the system could become corrupt from configuration and administration but still sound as far as data goes.
The restore should be able to restore to a bare drive (it's not unreasonable to us to make the user create the arrays before hand). The drive may not be the exact same model/size.
Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for your future advice dhh
-- ------------------------- David Havery dhavery@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.pssclabs.com (949) 380-7288 -------------------------