For most home system even a NAS type of device could be a good means of backup.
With the relative inexpensiveness of hard drives, they should be
readily available.
Stewart
At 07:37 AM 5/11/2009, you wrote:
If you like the idea of RAID, use it, but it is mostly for servers
that want 100% up-time. If one drive fails, then the other drive
will work alone until the failed drive can be hot-swapped. At least
that is the way it is supposed to work in that particular RAID
mode. Of course, if the RAID controller fails, the system is down
anyway. (striping is for achieving some increase in data transfer speed)
Do not use the RAID array as the backup. Have a separate regular
backup to external hard drives. (or tape or CD/DVD if you wish). A
good backup medium these days is a SATA hard drive mounted in one of
these "bare drive docking stations" that has a USB (or Firewire, or
E-SATA, or ..) interface. To physically mount the drive, you drop
it in the vertical slot and press it down. To physically dismount
the drive you press the eject lever on the box/device, and the drive
pops up. A standard bare 3.5" hard drive fits nicely in a small
bank safe deposit box, if you don't have any handier place for
off-site storage.
There are lots of free and cheap software for performing incremental
(new, newer files) backups to media that mount and perform like disk
drives. Schedulers will perform the automatic backup at any time
interval you wish. Some will even continuously monitor your data
directory for changed files and perform the backup
"immediately." That may be a hazard, as a corrupted file could
overwrite a good backup.
Fred Holmes
Rev. Stewart A. Marshall
mailto:[email protected]
Prince of Peace www.princeofpeaceozark.org
Ozark, AL SL 82
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