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krw[_4_]

In article ,
says...
On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:11:06 -0000, krw wrote:

In article ,
says...
On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:44:19 -0000, Clint Sharp wrote:

In message , William
Sommerwerck writes
My next computer will have integral RAID, and I won't have to manually back
up again, ever. (Except possibly Really Important stuff, just to be safe.)
With respect William, part of my job is recovering data off
failed/corrupted RAID sets. Do not rely on RAID to keep your data safe,
if the chances of two disks failing in a RAID 5 set then I must be the
luckiest (they weren't my RAID sets) man alive because I've seen it
dozens of times in the past 5 years. If you value your data then back it
up somewhere safe.

Use RAID 6. You have TWO redundancies.

Still doesn't protect you from the loose nut behind the keyboard.

And you can add some hotswaps too.

That's essentially a backup scheme, not significantly different
than cloning drives.

Never used a hotswap, but I'm assuming that they are idle empty drives which will automatically take over any other which fails.

No, they're cold standbys that can be "swapped in" with power on
("hot"). RAID ("mirrors") will take over automatically on failure,
but again, they don't solve the "loose nut" problem.

One of the simple solutions is to have a mirrored setup with
additional mirror drives left off-line. To do a backup, one
connects one of the off-line drives and the system builds a
"clone" of the original drive on the "backup" drive. Then take
that drive off line and put it out of the reach of the loose nut
(fire, system crash, whatever). TO restore the system, simply
reconnect the mirrored drive and rebuild the system drive as a
mirror of the "backup" drive.

I do something functionally the same, but don't use RAID of any
sort. I back up my laptop (using the supplied utility) once a week
to a USB drive that's online whenever I'm docked (also used for
music archives, etc.), then copy that drive to another USB drive
once in a while.

--
Keith