Raid back up strategy advice

<p>I work off of a Macbook. I use Apple's Time Machine and a Time Capsule to back up my Macbook. Its slow, especially if I have been gone for any length of time, but its an easy way to back up the internal harddrive.</p>

<p>My photos are stored on an external drive which is regularly backed up to a second external drive.</p>

<p>Within the last several months I have had two external drives fail. Thankfully, I have not lost any data.</p>

<p>Based on the advice of an on-line article, I purchased a LaCie 2 Big Quadra Raid drive. Each drive is 1TB. (The price of the Raid seemed to be about the same as buying two 1TB external drives, with the benefit of having the ability to swap out a bad drive and also eliminating some of the clutter of two drives.)</p>

<p>I now realize that mirrored drives solve the problem of disc failure, but do not provide safety for user error (accidentally deleting a file) or file corruption.</p>

<p>At present, I only have around 250 GB of data to back-up and store. </p>

<p>I have configured the Raid as follows: 2 500GB partitions. One partition is to be used as my photo drive. The second partition will be used for saving regular back-ups of the photo drive.</p>

<p>This should give me four copies of each file - two sets on each disc. </p>

<p>Down the road when I fill up the other 250 GB of data, I can get a second RAID to act as back-up.</p>

<p>Anybody have any advice on whether this configuration is a good or bad plan?</p>

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<p>A few points,<br>

Two copies on each disk is worthless if the power supply fries both drives in the same enclosure simultaneously. <br>

Have you considered any portion of your backup plan be off-site? Tape really has an advantage here. </p>

<p>Neither good nor bad, just not particularly functional. There is no "back up" in replicating files multiple times within one drive or RAID set—sections of a drive don't fail, whole drives do. Corruption gets talked up to the point of obsession, and you've already got another backup on your Time Capsule.</p>

<p>Also, if the previously failed drives were LaCies, the drives are probably fine (with all your data still intact) and just need new power supplies.</p>

<p>Backup solutions require that you put a nominal monetary value on your files. Until you decide what they're worth you can't decide how much time/money to spend on making sure they're safe. There is no point spending $40k on a fireproof multiply-redundant multiple-site backup solution if the files are only worth $20. Alternatively if the files you want to protect are earning you $100k annually in licencing fees then there's no point being a cheapskate on backups. </p>

<p>It's entirely your call though - only you can decide if what you've done is sufficient, or a good or bad plan. </p>

<p>I have used File Scavenger successful several times on hard drives that one of my machines could not see. Just take the drive out, buy one of those inexpensive external drive cases and put the drive in there, plug it into a working machine and run File Scavenger. It has actually never failed to find the data.<br>

Colin is probably right - the data is probably still there.</p>

<p>For backup, I personally use RAID 5 as you get the best of both worlds, but that requires more disks. I'll be setting up my new machine with RAID 1 internally and RAID 5 for backup (an Iomega StoreCenter).</p>

<p>Look at something like Mozy for inexpensive online backup. One warning, though, that you need a lot of space on your C drive if you are backing up a lot of data (it keeps stalling on my main machine, but I've got about 200gb backed up on their servers for $50/year).<br>

This is just one more inexpensive way to back things up. I've had enough old DVD's not work recently to realize that is not a good long term solution (funny how my older laptop sees most of the DVDs, but my new machines can't read them - very annoying!).</p>

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