On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 16:30, Massimiliano Stucchi wrote: > So why not use a cheap IDE RAID controller and do RAID1 ? I think it > would be much safer, and reduce the amount of time needed to restore the > system once a hard drive fails. We use RAID1 with a spare drive on our > web and email servers here, and there's no downtime each time a drive > fails, having put all the drives on hot-swap bays on a promise fasttrack > controller. > > Greetings
You could, and it would definitely give you an increase in the availability of the machine as you mention. One disk goes down, simply mount the good one and press on. What it doesn't give you, however, is a proper backup solution. Backups protect not only against disk failures but also mitigate the following: * Accidental or hasty deletions * Security compromise * Catastrophic overall system failure (such as a power surge that takes out everything connected to the motherboard). This, of course, depends on the backups being isolated from the system, which mine currently are not. RAID will not help you in any of these situations. My incremental backup solution allows me to retrieve an exact copy of the contents of the file server as it looked at any point in time, from when the very first backup was made (about two years ago) to the present. This has saved me more times than I care to remember. Charles Ulrich -- http://bityard.net _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"