On Dec 4, 2006, at 3:33 PM, Mike Hamilton wrote: > My current setup for image storage is as follows: > > working images on my internal hard drive (Powerbook) (60gb hard drive) > occaisional backup on a 160gb external hard drive and, > also on DVD+R. > > I'd like to improve that by setting up a RAID 1 system with two > external hard drives. The laptop is normally plugged into the > external drives, but on occaision i take it travelling, without the > external drives. > > Is this practical with a RAID 1 system? Does anyone have any > experience with this setup? Other recommendations? > > Mike
Hello Mike, I'm not sure what you mean what is "practical" regarding a RAID 1 system. Do you mean portable, convenient, or something else? To infer and extend, I do know that one of the most exciting features of the next rev of OS X is "Time Machine", which is essentially a retrospective incremental backup that will allow a user to have an extremely user-friendly variant of a Grandfather-Father-Son <http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather-Father-Son_Backup> backup schema, something that I currently have to accomplish through hand-tailored scripts and diligence on my systems. Anyway, RAID 1 is a good idea, considering the relative affordability of 3.5" drives these days and the fact there is the age-old axiom that there are only two types of people: those who have had a disk fail and those that will (Chan's corollary: You will forget to perform the primary backup of your drive precisely in the interval between the committal a very important piece of data to that drive and it's next failure). I've seen out-of-box FW 800/400/USB2.0 OS X/ HFS-ready 500 GB RAID 1 (that optionally also do 1TB RAID 0) enclosure/system for less than 500 dollars. Two caveats: First: I've built many servers with a variety of hardware/OS/data configurations that have run fine with no major integrity problems, but on one occasion, I built a RAID 1 SMB server (Linux, software- based RAID 1) using hard drives that were sequentially manufactured (Seagate 160GB SATA drives for anyone who cares) where both drives failed within a very short time span a few months after deployment. In that case, one drive started reporting failure. It had failed completely by the time I finished backing the data off the array. The other drive failed prior to the completion of the rebuild process of the array after I replaced the first bad drive. Elapsed time: less than three hours. The lesson learned to me was that although it's arguably a good idea to use drives of identical manufacture, it also may be a good idea to source those drives from different purveyors. I would imagine that prefab enclosures that provide RAID functionality are likely using drives that are out of the same manufacturing batch, increasing the likelihood if one is a lemon, both are, and you can't make lemonade from that pair of lemons. Second: RAID does nothing to protect you from fire/flood/theft/plague of metal-eating locusts, of which you probably already are aware, so occasional-to-frequent backup and removal to an off-site location by way of tape/DVD/what-have-you is an important part of your plan. Michael Chan P.S. - Since I'm new here, question to the long-timers. On self- described OT posts, is it appropriate to go into such detail on list, or should I be replying off list? Thanks and apologies if I'm out-of- bounds. mc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
