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mapatton;249749 Wrote: > I should have mentioned that is 1 TB in RAID 0+1 (2 TB of actual > storage); I'm not going to loose those hours of work to something > stupid like a failed disk. Be careful... A "failed disk" is only one of the ways one can lose data, and probably not even the most likely one. File system corruption, program errors, hardware errors (other than the RAID drives) and even operator errors can all cause data loss which RAID won't prevent. The best insurance is a complete, off-line backup. If you're really paranoid, 2 separate, complete off-line backups allows you to keep at least one backup off-line at all times, even while the other 2 are being synchronized. RAID is one technique that allows high up-time in mission critical business applications, but it is not a substitute for an off-line (or at least on a different computer) backup. One thing that improves your chances of not losing data is to pay attention to what the synchronization program is doing! About a year ago, Windows decided that about half-a-dozen of my music files were part of a corrupt section on the disk, so it daleted them to fix up the disk. The next time I ran Microsoft "Synctoy", rather than copy them from the backup, it was going to make the disks match by deleting the good copy from the backup! Needless to say I manually restored them before letting Synctoy have its way with synchronization. Since then, I've been using "Allway Sync" instead, it seems to be much more robust, but I still check the "preview" after it analyzes the changes before I turn it loose to actually do the synchronization. As the network administrator for my company, I maintain a separate complete backup off-site that is synchronized weekly. One other issue with backups is that often they are made, but noone checks if the data can actually be restored from the backup. While I've never had reason to do a complete restore, I occasionally get a request to restore a file or directory that a user has accidentally trashed, so I periodically do restore individual pieces from the backups. For my personal music library, right now I'm using a pair of 250GB USB drives and a pair of 500GB drives. I keep one set at home and one at the office and synchronize them weekly. I'm almost out of space on the 500GB drives, so I may add another 500 GB pair. Hoiwever, with this much data, I'm starting to feel somewhat insecure with only two copies. (Well, I do have all the original CDs, but ripping, editing, encoding and tagging is a task I'd rather not repeat for stuff I've already done.) So likely, I'll make a third complete backup to be stored in my self storage locker. -- Timothy Stockman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Timothy Stockman's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8867 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19817 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
