Data backup

[volt01]

I am looking at methods of backing up my data on my computer and was wondering what the best route would be.

1) I could get a second 7200 rpm 640GB WD caviar black to put in raid. (I think 0 makes an exact copy of my hard drive on the second drive).

2) My second choice was to buy a 5400rpm green drive and either manually backup files or use the built in backup utility in windows (does anyone have any experience with this? Would this be my best bet. I have windows 7 fyi)

3) Lastly I was considering buying an external HDD and following the same method described above for backing up my data.

Also a reccomendation of a good drive to purchase for part 2 or 3 would be appreciated.

 

[MrGuvernment]

no raid 1 makes a copy, but your still prone to mechanical failure.

if you cant spend much, get an external eSATA drive, hook it up when you need to do the backup, and then power it off and store it in a safe place until it is needed again, on top of that you could burn backups to good quality DVD's as well to store for a while.

 

[dustNbone]

RAID1 performs mirroring across 2 or more physical disks, and it does protect you from mechanical failure, just not much else. If you have a mirrored volume, and one of the drives physically stops working, your data is likely to be safely stored intact on the remaining functional drive. However, this is about the only failure you are protected from, an actual physical failure of one of the drives. If your data is affected by user error, viruses, etc, then whatever affects one copy will automatically affect the other, as they are mirror images of one another. This is where RAID and backup become different things. Backup generally means "offline", as in normally not directly accessible by the computer except when performing actual backup operations. This scheme however doesn't protect data that has changed since your last backup operation, so if you back up daily say at 4PM, and your work all day on your data and something bad happens to your HD at 3PM, you've lost a days worth of work.

Backup systems can be very expensive in terms of money and time, depending how much data you need to secure, and how secure it needs to be. If it's a collection of DVD rips, you probably don't want to go to the trouble of ripping them again, but doing so wouldn't be a catastrophe. So a simple RAID1 mirror might be just the thing for that. But for your work, things that aren't easily replaceable but tend to not be as large in terms of GBs, you might want to add daily backup to an external HD, and maybe some kind of cloud (online) storage if the dataset isn't too large. You can update the online copy as changes are made or maybe hourly.

In short, a RAID1 will only protect you from failure of a drive, not from user error or malicious code.

Dustin

 

[tgrimley]

In short, a RAID1 will only protect you from failure of a drive, not from user error or malicious code.

..or from a bad controller, or a power failure, or a corrupt write, or..

RAID1 is not a method for "backup," which is what the OP asked for

Get an external and backup with robocopy or acronis or another software package. My opinion is that the built in windows backup still sucks (almost no options, no incremental, etc etc).