Retroactive RAID 1 array?

Samione

Samione

Samione

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I've never setup a RAID array before and am looking to back up the data I have using this system.

I'm hoping to just pop in a new HDD into my tower and have it copy all the data across and then following that update it as new files are written to the original drive - this drive won't contain the OS or any software, just documents/files.

I've done a bit of research and it seems to suggest this might not be possible, or is difficult to pull off, dependant on OS/hardware combos. So I wanted to ask here before I start buying new hard drives.

My setup is

Core i7 4930k
ASUS® P9X79 WS
120GB KINGSTON V300 SSD
1TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 32MB CACHE (i'll be RAIDing this driver)

I'm on windows 7 home premium.

Any advice/sources on setting this up would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers.
 
<broken record> RAID is not a backup </broken record>

The problem with RAID is that if you accidentally delete a file it's gone from the both disks. If something gets corrupted, its corrupt on both disks...

You'd be better off with an external disk that you can manually (or automatically via a scheduler) sync with your main disk using rsync, robocopy or another of the multitude of available tools.
 
Samione said:
I've never setup a RAID array before and am looking to back up the data I have using this system.
Click to expand...

RAID 1 is high availability, not backup as described above. If one drive goes down you keep running on the second one, but if you delete files, wipe a drive, etc. the files are gone from both.

Samione said:
I'm hoping to just pop in a new HDD into my tower and have it copy all the data across and then following that update it as new files are written to the original drive - this drive won't contain the OS or any software, just documents/files.

I've done a bit of research and it seems to suggest this might not be possible, or is difficult to pull off, dependant on OS/hardware combos. So I wanted to ask here before I start buying new hard drives.
Click to expand...

Why would it be difficult? It's just a standard RAID 1 volume on non-system drives.

Enable/install the Intel RST drivers, change your BIOS to boot to RAID, then use the IRST utility to make a RAID1 volume from the two hard drives, using one of them as the source to copy to the others. You continue to boot off the SSD and the RAID volume is your high availability.

The biggest problem you will have is that if your drives are not set to RAID in the BIOS you will have to do some backup/restore and copying about to set that up. As you've initially got a spare drive, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
 
rpstewart said:
<broken record> RAID is not a backup </broken record>

The problem with RAID is that if you accidentally delete a file it's gone from the both disks. If something gets corrupted, its corrupt on both disks...

You'd be better off with an external disk that you can manually (or automatically via a scheduler) sync with your main disk using rsync, robocopy or another of the multitude of available tools.
Click to expand...

I didn't even think of that actually... so cheers. I guess RAID isn't really what I'm looking for. Couldn't I pull off what you're talking about with another internal HDD? Wouldn't the write speed be faster than using NAS or an external USB drive?
 
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Samione said:
I didn't even think of that actually... so cheers. I guess RAID isn't really what I'm looking for. Couldn't I pull off what you're talking about with another internal HDD? Wouldn't the write speed be faster than using NAS or an external USB drive?
Click to expand...

Yes, you can dedicate a spare internal drive to backups. It will be faster, but obviously if your system gets hit by lightning, your backup is in the same case.
 
Samione said:
Cheers. I imagine if my home gets hit by lightning and my NAS enclosure is plugged in it'll still be fried though.
Click to expand...

If you're really serious about backups, you keep them off site. Heck, in the event of a fire, you could still grab an external drive and run out of the house!
 
I would not use an internal drive for backups, it carries many of the same risks as raid, such as viruses deleting or corrupting files. An external hard drive that is disconnected when not backing up is much better.
 
Raid 1 or better yet a software equivalent, is not a bad first step in making sure your data is available, but like others have said it's not a backup.
What it does, it makes sequential read twice as fast in ideal circumstances.
I use it for example for Steam games collection - once installed, there's very few writes and it speeds up the reads substantially. As my collection grows larger, I don't bother backing up the binaries - I can always redownload them.
But since you were asking questions about backup - you should use multiple approaches, to ensure that even if one method fails, you can restore the data with the other. In my case, it's a combination of a backup to NAS in another part of the house and cloud backup to at least two different providers, so in case things go wrong, I have 3-4 different sources to recover from.
 
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