2 x 500GB set up

[Lee]

I've just ordered the parts for my new system. These include 2 Seagate 500GB SATA HDD's. I want to use one of the disks to back-up the data on the other.

I'm looking for some opinions on the best way to do this. I've thought about setting them up as a mirrored pair using the onboard raid, but I've heard that there are peformance issues with this and also that won't protect me from a data corruption problem (I work in the industry and I've seen the effect of data corruption in a raid array).

I've thought about using a 50Gb partition for the O/S (Vista 64bit) on the boot disk and then creating an image of this on the other disk. I could then manually back up data files to the spare disk as and when I wanted to, or automate this with some software (not too sure how this would work).

The PC will be my gaming machine and the family office machine. It will have our photo's on, so I want to make sure I have a robust backup system in place.

Any advice from anyone ?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Raid1 doesn't offer backup as such, it is for system availability in the event of a single drive failure.

A more robust option would be to have an external drive that you backed up to on a regular basis and you keep it off site so that in the event of a catastrophic failure you could restore all but the most recent files from the hard drive. Also don't forget about DVDs, 3gb+ is still a decent capacity and would allow you to store in albums quite nicely.

 

[Lee]

Cheers semi-pro. I still plan to archive the photo's onto DVD.