[SOLVED] Best way to mirror two hard drives?

[nazsoyo]

I have two 16tb hard drives, i simply want to mirror them in case one fails and to avoid losing so much data. Neither will have os as they are only used for storage.

I was initially thinking of raid 1 within bios but had trouble setting it up. Then i was about to use windows disk mirror which is easy to setup but now i'm thinking of simply transferring the files across with a software like FreeFileSync, i can setup daily automatic mirroring.

Is there any advantage to using raid or windows disk mirror?

 

[popatim]

Use neither if you truly value your data's safety. Bios Raid1 or Windows mirror leaves you with 'what happens to one drive will happen to the other at the same time' syndrome.
Put one in an external enclosure or get a drive dock and use it as a regularly used backup drive.

 

[OrlyP]

What kind of failure modes are you anticipating?

RAID or any variation of it (whether done in hardware or software) pertains to mirroring, striping with or without parity, or any combination of such, across different physical disks or storage units. Data is written concurrently to all drives in the volume and depending on the type of RAID you chose, it can potentially protect you from single or multiple hard disk failures. What it can't protect you from is corruption due to virus attacks and/or user error... such as accidentally purging a file or directory.

Anyway, don't confuse RAID with backup. RAID of any kind is NOT backup. Having a backup means you have a point-in-time copy of all your data that is stored independent of the source data. It's a way for you to recover files up to the point of the last backup schedule in situations where something was accidentally deleted or modified in your current copy or if it has been compromised by a virus or ransomware.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

what you need is a backup solution.

use one drive to backup the other. use Macrium Reflect or some other good backup software to do automated daily incrementals.

then, make sure you have the cloud space and do a cloud backup of your data. that way if your physical copy is destroyed or corrupted you have cloud as backup of backup

 

[sonofjesse]

Windows 10 PRO will mirror drives. A good backup solution is never a bad idea, just plan out how important the data is and what your needs are.

 

[Zerk2012]

I would agree popatim with both drives in the PC it's not really protecting your data.
If you have a single drive failure it would but what if something else happened and fried your drives everything is gone.

A true backup would be using external drives not connected to the PC except to perform the backup.

Back when I was using my PC for more work I had internal, external, and a external that I would keep at my brothers house in case of a fire or something.

And yes I learned this the hard way like most people do.

 

[nazsoyo]

Use neither if you truly value your data's safety. Bios Raid1 or Windows mirror leaves you with 'what happens to one drive will happen to the other at the same time' syndrome.
Put one in an external enclosure or get a drive dock and use it as a regularly used backup drive.

You make a good point, this would be the safest, i'm just a little lazy to do this and hate having the external drive take up space on desk. I have tested FreeFileSync and it works quite well, will be using this and if i ever decide to use it in the enclosure i can always do that as this was a shucked drive.