What do you guys propose as the most efficient way to use my drives? I have a lian li v354 system beng built that is a new/larger home server and NAS. While it's a file server, I'd also like to do backups to the server, from my numerous home workstations, better than what I'm doing now (manual).
Should I:
A) RAID everything in RAID1/RAID5 sets
-or-
B) RAID the file server drives but use standalone drives for storing entire drive backups from my workstations
I figure as long as the drives are monitored on the server, it would be quite unlikely that a workstation drive would fail at the same time that a drive fails in the server. My workstation files aren't all THAT important either but I just had another Seagate drive die (this time the motor is having problems) and it's just a huge nuisance to get everything setup again. I lost just e-mail history (not really important although I have had the same inbox move from system to system for nearly 10 years and apparently no existing backups...), browser settings/bookmarks (some a few years old but kept on purpose.), a bunch of virtual machine hard drives that have numerous uses, downloads from Steam, drivers etc for all my systems, and so on. Some license files will be a pain to restore for applications but I can still get them. The failed drive was just reviewed and data updated just last month...
Basically, important files/photos/etc are still backed and timestamped to the server and then duplicated to an external drive but I'd like fairly reliable backups of all my systems' drives in case of future drive failures. Currently I'm down to one Seagate drive as I have two here I need to RMA (again) and the backups being performed are using option B, manually at the moment. I used to mirror the drives on my main system but with dead drives and now having other systems/laptops on hand with a single drive, this isn't a very useful solution.
Should I:
A) RAID everything in RAID1/RAID5 sets
-or-
B) RAID the file server drives but use standalone drives for storing entire drive backups from my workstations
I figure as long as the drives are monitored on the server, it would be quite unlikely that a workstation drive would fail at the same time that a drive fails in the server. My workstation files aren't all THAT important either but I just had another Seagate drive die (this time the motor is having problems) and it's just a huge nuisance to get everything setup again. I lost just e-mail history (not really important although I have had the same inbox move from system to system for nearly 10 years and apparently no existing backups...), browser settings/bookmarks (some a few years old but kept on purpose.), a bunch of virtual machine hard drives that have numerous uses, downloads from Steam, drivers etc for all my systems, and so on. Some license files will be a pain to restore for applications but I can still get them. The failed drive was just reviewed and data updated just last month...
Basically, important files/photos/etc are still backed and timestamped to the server and then duplicated to an external drive but I'd like fairly reliable backups of all my systems' drives in case of future drive failures. Currently I'm down to one Seagate drive as I have two here I need to RMA (again) and the backups being performed are using option B, manually at the moment. I used to mirror the drives on my main system but with dead drives and now having other systems/laptops on hand with a single drive, this isn't a very useful solution.