>On last week's show, one of the guys recommended a DROBO for external >hard drive storage . I looked into it and I think this might be >overkill for what I need, plus the up front cost is too high for me
Those guys are not "the guys." I find those guys quite distressing. DROBO is a terrible recommendation and demonstrates the person's cluelessness. It didn't take you long to figure this out for yourself. I hope this recommendation is just due to cluelessness and not an attempt to push something they are selling. >I think I just want to have a RAID 1 (mirrored RAID) setup to back-up >my photo archive. Bad idea. This arrangement will protect you against the least likely type of problem (drive failure) and will merely replicate the most likely types of problems (soft failures) onto both drives. >Is there any advantage to getting this kind of set up rather than two >individual 1 TB drives that I set up in a RAID 1 configuration myself >like I've done in the past? Get 2 individual drives, but do not set them up as RAID. Instead run a backup program to sync up the two drives periodiclly. This will insulate the second drive from some types of soft errors. Better than syncing is to run TimeMachine, because it will protect you against more types of soft failures. For example if you accidently delete files or if files become corrupted TimeMachine will let you go back to previous versions to replace them. If you go with TimeMachine the backup drive should be about twice as large as the primary drive. Running the backup once a day usually works, but you could run it much more often if necessary. TimeMachine runs hourly by default. >Lastly, after many years of reliable use, one of my old Lacie drives >has failed. I have the other half of the RAID as backup. I'd like to >rebuild the RAID and was wondering if I could just open up the >enclosure with the bad drive and replace it. Is that a bad idea or is >it pretty straightforward and easy to do? With most RAIDs you have to match the two drives quite closely. That is why old, obsolete drives are often sold at such crazy high prices. It might be safer to just copy your files to the new drive and get a fresh start. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
