To RAID or not to RAID, that is the question.

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At the weekend I had a catastrophic HD failure and if I'd been younger I'd be crying but life goes on. I've tried a multitude of software and taken the drive to somebody who does data recovery for a living and he couldn't do anything.

Anyway, I don't want this to happen again so do I buy a couple of 3TB hard drives and RAID 1 them or shall I buy one drive and buy an external drive and do regular backups?

What would be your choice and why?
 
Associate
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regular back up, raid can not protect you against user based bleep ups, while back ups can, provided you notice your error before your next back up schedule copies that error onto your back up drives
 
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RAID 1 will keep you going if you have a drive failure, but it won't help if you accidentally delete something or get infected with ransomware. The safest option is regular external backups
 
Soldato
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my backup method:

2016-07-26%2018.36.07.jpg
 
Man of Honour
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Forgot to update -

1 x Samsung 250gb SSD
2 x 3TB Toshiba HDD
1 x Icy Box Docking & Clone Station - very impressive.

sddhddclone.jpg


I also had a stroke of luck.
When I was removing my faulty drive I noticed a 2TB drive still in there that I replaced the 3TB for because it started to play up.
I've basically saved most of my important data.
 
Soldato
Joined
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9,315
At the weekend I had a catastrophic HD failure and if I'd been younger I'd be crying but life goes on. I've tried a multitude of software and taken the drive to somebody who does data recovery for a living and he couldn't do anything.

Anyway, I don't want this to happen again so do I buy a couple of 3TB hard drives and RAID 1 them or shall I buy one drive and buy an external drive and do regular backups?

What would be your choice and why?

RAID and backups are for two different things.

RAID is for high availability. Lose a drive, and just keep going on the other until you put a new one in and rebuild. Minimal interruption, and you still have your system.

Backups are for data security. Lose a drive and you have to restore from backups, but you can also restore after losing a machine, suffering a catastrophic virus attack, house fire, etc.
 
Man of Honour
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RAID and backups are for two different things.

RAID is for high availability. Lose a drive, and just keep going on the other until you put a new one in and rebuild. Minimal interruption, and you still have your system.

Backups are for data security. Lose a drive and you have to restore from backups, but you can also restore after losing a machine, suffering a catastrophic virus attack, house fire, etc.

Hence my rather convoluted backup solution where I have a QNAP NAS with internal RAID for uptime convenience realtime replication to an external USB drive plugged in the back of it and 2-3 extra USB drives that I take a snapshot via the front USB copy port on a regular basis. (only slightly paranoid about crypto type malware).
 
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