RAID 1 vs. scheduled backup

[Centurion]

Hello Superfly,

I am the author of the article cited above, and I wanted to address your criticisms:

1/2) I am not making the point is not that RAID does anything to make you worse off from accidental deletion or viruses...I am just saying that it does nothing to help. I know you're point is that is common sense, but you'd be suprised. Not a lot of people stop to think about HOW RAID1 might protect them, they just like the overall feeling of protection. The point I am making is that there are some everyday sources of data loss (or at least annoyances) that RAID1 does not help with.

3) Absolutely, theft! That's why offsite backup exists You can very easily take your external hard drive with you, or at least put it in your closet.

4) Yes, power failure can cause problems to any hard drive, but your statistical chance of problem increases as you add hard drives. Yes, you can just rebuild the array, granted.

Thanks for the comments!

Jon Bach - President
Puget Custom Computers
http://www.pugetsystems.com

I have to ask Jon, how exactly did you wire up one of the hard drives incorrectly?

Centurion

 

[jonbach]

I suppose that wasn't the best way to put it. What happened is we sleeved a power supply, and when we put the molex connectos back on, we swapped the 5V and 12V wires on the SATA connector we plugged it into.

Lots of smoke

 

[Guest]

Raid 1 at home is sorta of a waste in my opinion unless your running a server or the like.

Regular backups on an external source are the way to go. Like an external NAS. Then maybe to another external USB drive or a few DVD-RW's

Do you keep all your data on your NAS or is it just a backup of your PCs data?

That will make a difference if the NAS backup is enough. If the NAS houses ALL your data then for sure make a backup to another USB drive or DVD's

 

[brymerica]

Thanks to all who have replied

So after reading all of this, I think I'm going to take my drives off of RAID 1 and simply have my NAS w/ a 250gb HD attached to it and back up the NAS to this weekly. Sure, I could just buy another HD to do this, but then I would have my data on the NAS, the RAID1 drive, the new HD, and I already have most of it on an old HD that I keep at a different location, seems overkill.

So, my question though is how to best schedule a backup from my NAS to my USB hard drive. I don't want a typical backup file though, I just want all the actual files so that I can grab the hard drive and go to a friend's house with it if i need to. So basically, I want a program to duplicate the NAS drive to the USB drive once a week, ie. add new files and replace all old files IF they have been updated on the NAS. Make sense?

I downloaded the trial version of arconis trueimage as some have suggested but it doesn't seem to be able to do this.

 

[zenmaster]

A simple method is to use "ROBOCOPY".
This is available from Microsoft.Com

This can be used to exactly Mirror a source and destination location.
Simply Schedule RoboCopy to run via Windows Scheduler every night or whenever you chose.

 

[Guest]

http://www.2brightsparks.com/

SyncBack is the best backup software I have used. It is great. Backs up to almost anything you can think of.

 

[croc]

Nice article, and good points made.

But one point that seems to have been missed, and an important point, is that if you haven't done a bare-metal restore you don't really know if you have a valid backup strategy.

 

[rubishsimpleton]

Take advice from someone whose truly has been there. Imagine two great hard drives in an upper end system with "high quality power supply" on a reliable battery backup. I come home one day to the acrid smell of burning plastic. Either massive voltage spike or horrid short in the PC power supply literally fries BOTH drives and motherboard. Catastrophe!

Panic ensues, where are the pictures, wife is going to kill me, contemplating moving out of the house........ but WAIT........

I pull out one of our two trusty USB/SATA EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES that we (try) to religiously back up to at least once monthly. They are kept in a safe (yes a media approved safe) so that in the event of minor catastrophe or perhaps even mild fire damage to home, data and disk is off the power grid, virus/malware safe and yet so accessible.

Oh, we also burn photo and video to CD/DVD which we store in the safe as well, which is a comfort. Wife also backs up photos online through a reputable online photo storage/printing company (you take your pick, there are multiple choices) as it costs nothing to store them on their servers, if you buy some photos once in a while from them (which you would do anyway)

Even if I had a separate home server backing up all our home PC's nightly, you can still get burned by whole house voltage spikes.

All you must do to sleep soundly is actually DO THE BACKUP routinely. When you are done, disconnect it and put it away somewhere safely. DO IT. It will save your behind one day or your head from a frying pan attack.

Remember, when the computer dies, even if God made it happen, you will still bear the blame from your significant other