RAID1

[Chidoro]

I just want to ask, a RAID1 drive isn't really designed to protect against a virus attack does it? Being that both drives are writtten to simultaneously, wouldn't both drives get ruined? In my simplistic knowledge terms, it's really designed to keep you up and runnning in the event one of the two drives gets locked up?

Just want to check as we are going to be finally replacing my 6 1/2 year old Dell in the near future and want to make sure I don't bother w/ the RAID1 and just get an external drive for my backups/re-imaging.

Just for chuckles, and you will chuckle, my current setup (if you want to call it that):
P4 2.53GHz
1 gig rdram (was expensive to add to the 512 it came with)
80 gig HD (the main reason we need to get with the times. WotLK is on my maxtor backup drive because it doesn't fit)
ATI X700 (came with a 7800 that fried about 2 years ago; 700 didn't suck up too much power out of the ridiculously small 250W power supply)
old 19 in monitor but it's fine
old speakers w/ sub woofer which is also fine

Almost sad really, used to upgrade every 12 months. But, since I really only play WoW, Galactic Civ, and Go on IGS, a superpower machine isn't really that necessary. But the music and pics are starting to add up now that my wife has gotten renewed interest in using the pc again.

[Zaelath]

I just want to ask, a RAID1 drive isn't really designed to protect against a virus attack does it? Being that both drives are writtten to simultaneously, wouldn't both drives get ruined? In my simplistic knowledge terms, it's really designed to keep you up and runnning in the event one of the two drives gets locked up?

You are correct.

We primarily use RAID1 to protect configuration; i.e. it's lovely to have a backup of yesterday's data, but it would also be really nice not to have to reinstall a windows SBS server from scratch just because a HDD didn't make it's mean time between failures. I say SBS, because it's a got to be the longest install time of an operating system to date, even feeding Windows 98 into a machine from 20+ floppies didn't take as long to get to the point where you can hope to start configuring the bloody thing.

or umm to put it another way; RAID1/5 protect you from hardware failure... as long as it's not the controller chip that fails and writes garbage all over both drives

Backup protects you from data corruption/deletion.

Taking that backup off site protects you from you data and your backups being burnt/stolen.

Well, provided you verify the backups... and the source data... often...

IMO if you have stuff like the electronic family album that you would *really* hate to lose, get an account w/ an offsite backup data warehouse. Dell are giving away a 2Gb store with every PC at the moment, in Australia, probably the US too.

Oh and don't expect to pull your kid's baby photos off a CD for their 21st birthday, there's a better than average chance they won't be readable after about 2-5 years unless you live in a library, and are lucky. http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/11365-CD-R ... think.html

[Chidoro]

Since SD cards are so inexpensive, We just keep the info on those. Our older ones are kept in our safety deposit box. I'm sure there's probably a liability to SD cards as well, but what can you do.

I have an external maxtor drive w/ safetydrill for my current pc. Once I get stuff on the new computer, whenever we get it, and copy stuff over, I'll put that away in the box as well.

Thanks for the info, I appreciate it.

[valryte]

Don't forget about imaging. You can use something like Acronis to make an image of the drive on to another drive. This can be scheduled, so you can do this nightly, weekly, etc... I work from home developing software, so I really can't afford any downtime. For my backup needs I do several things. I have nightly off site backups running on my desktop using Jungle Disk with Amazon S3 and on my server I use MozyPro. Mozy is so much more expensive so I'll probably be getting rid of it soon and just stick with Jungle Disk. So this takes care of possible theft, fire, hurricanes, etc... I also use Acronis to create weekly images of my computers. That takes care of possible OS related issues, corrupt OS, virus, etc...And I also use 2 drives in RAID 1 for my OS in case of hard drive failure.

So basically, there is no silver bullet when it comes to backups. Different solutions target different types of problems.

[Chidoro]

That's whats Safetydrill is suppposed to do and it has worked pretty well so far. Since our harddrive (and computer for that matter) is so old, even the compact maxtor drive is double the size of our computer's harddrive so re-imaging is easy. I would anticipate continuing doing this as opposed to using a RAID1 drive thinling I'm protected. Thanks for the additional info.

[Fyndina]

6 TB RAID 10 SAN, replicated to another SAN 500 miles away. Plus backups every 15 minutes.

oh wait, that was my server at work.

At home I do not have anything on my local drives that could not be reinstalled.