Is this a good idea?

I recently had an external harddrive crash, and lost a lot of data in the process. Because of that, I bought two 1TB drives in a RAID setup, and partitioned them into thirds. The people at the computer store suggested I do this, and I'm hoping it'll prevent another data loss.

I was doing some reading tonight about RAID, and saw that it's usually used for servers, and wanted to see what others think about this. Will this give me a lot more certainty that my data won't crash? Or would it be better for me to not use RAID at all, and to back it up on my own, using the two drives manually?

Gizmo,

A RAID solution is not a substitue for a normal backup !
RAID will increase the resilience against a disk failure ( hardware ) by spreading your data across multiple disks ( This is not true for RAID 0.... forget RAID 0 )
If one disk fails, your data will still be there and you can can replace the faulty disk and continue working.

However, RAID was not designed to be a backup solution , so if you want to protect your data in a proper way, ensure you have a backup of your data on an external drive.

Have a look in the switchers forum on here, there is a sticky on backup's and you'll know what I mean.

One ounce of prevention equals one pound of cure.

Cheers ... McBie

Cheers for the info, very informative.

All in all, would you suggest I instead make full use of my two drives (1TB each) and copy/paste stuff across them both from time to time as a backup? I have far too much stuff to fit on my Mac alone, so only the most important is backed up on the Mac, with the rest being on the external. It'd be nice to have access to a full 2TB instead of just 1TB RAID, since I now understand RAID is not a backup.

Possible combinations with 2 x 1TB drives:
RAID-1 will give you a partition of 1 TB total storage and you have the protection against the failure of a single disk, because your data is identical across the 2 disks.
if one disk fails, you can continue working, replace the failed disk and re-sync ... no data loss

RAID 0 ( zero ) will give you a 2 TB partition WITHOUT any protection against a disk failure. if one disk fails, you will loose the complete 2 TB partition, and all data on there.

Both solutions still require you to have a backup on another external disk if you want to play it safe !

Cheers ... McBie

Hmm... I'm having a little trouble understanding the problem then. I have a RAID setup which turns two 1TB disks into a single mirrored drive, and I understood when buying it that if one drive goes, the data will still be backed up. Since I have far too much media to put on my MacBook alone, I keep it all on the external, and I figured this would be a safe way to keep it redundant. Isn't that exactly what RAID 1 is?

Yep .... you are right with RAID 1

However, keep in mind that RAID 1 will happily mirror deletions / corruptions and all other goodies between the 2 drives as well.....
What about the scenario of having a failing disk controller that will introduce corrupted data .... that will also be happily mirrored between the 2 drives.

Cheers ... McBie

As McBie said, if a controller fails it can destroy both drives and then where would you be? As an former admin, we use RAIDS to get systems back up and running quickly or to keep users from seeing a disk failure. Your RAID, RAID1, requires you to break the mirror and then boot to the new drive. Everything that you put on the old drive is automtically copied to the new. However, as admins, we also create backups of these drives to tape or disk as you never know with electroincs. So, if I were you I would get an external drive and use time machine to backup the drives to it.

But doesn't Time Machine only work on my Mac? As I said above, I have so much data that I'm keeping it off of my MacBook entirely and having it on the external drive instead.

Would I be safer just copy/pasting the data between the two drives to back it up? It seems that the Pro here would be that if one disc controller failed, it wouldn't affect the other, the Con being that it would be a more time-consuming process.

Get a NAS maybe?

They're a completely dedicated, separate storage solution. Regardless of which you choose, a separate RAID array, or an NAS (or other dedicated storage server), to play it really safe, you'll still want to have another source for your backup.

With the amount of data people are consuming these days, they've become more affordable for the consumer.

Something like THIS would suffice, and is relatively affordable.

I'm not familiar with Time Machine, but I'm sure you can set it to make a new backup, say every week.

I use an Other World Computing Guardian 1 TB RAID1 external for data. It's set up as one big 1TB drive with no partitions. This is for iTunes, iPhoto, installers, Linux Distros, base VM images, etc... as well as my "live" OSs via Time Machine. Once a month, I run Carbon Copy Cloner and back up each of my 3 Macs to separate external disks. I also, once a month run a copy of the RAID1 to an external 1TB Seagate Freeagent . This Seagate and the 3 external disks are what get put into the safety deposit box at my bank. That's the best home solution I've come up with based on my budget. While I'd love to have TSM going at home with daily tapes coming in and going out to Iron Mountain, that's not an option for me. Oh, we also put photos and important emails (bill pay, receipts, etc) on DVD when we think of it. Admittedly, we don't do it very often and I should set a reminder to do this more frequently.

NOTE: Thread moved to appropriate forum. Not just anything goes in Anything Goes

What are you backing the external drive up too? If you have your data in only one location then you are asking for trouble. Also a RAID is pointless if you are not keeping the data on them as the OS can be re-installed fairly easily.

I'm still a little confused. Here's my situation:

I have about 500GB of info which I want to store off of my MacBook Pro, save for about 50GB of that which are important files, photos of travel, etc. which I backup on all computers. Otherwise, I want to keep the 500GB off of my MacBook Pro entirely, but I still want to be able to access it when I'm at home... A lot of it is music, movies, things like that.

So, I bought a 1TB drive for this, which sadly failed a few weeks ago. I bought 2 new 1TB drives and was planning to have one as a backup for the other. The guy at the computer store told me to buy a housing which could keep both of them in it at once, and that I could have them mirror one another automatically via RAID, so I wouldn't have to painstakingly copy/paste them back and forth.

Is this not the case? How should I proceed with this? The two options I have available are:

1) use the two drives in a RAID setup, mirroring one another
2) keep the 2 drives separate in the housing, and physically copy/paste stuff over as it accumulates to have it backed up in the event one of the drives fails.

Still waiting for an answer on this. Is it really that hard for the compu-savvy here?

gizmo8899 said:

Still waiting for an answer on this. Is it really that hard for the compu-savvy here?

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My apologies your highness. <unsubscribed>

Is this an apology for not having an answer now, or for completely going off on your own tangent and talking about yourself and your own habits above, avoiding the question entirely? I really don't care how you back up your own files, I was wondering about the best way to back up mine, the info provided considered. I gather keeping things on topic is a requirement of this forum.

It wasn't really an apology. It was a sarcastic response to your smart alec post.

Please keep your sarcasm to yourself, then. I'm looking for honest and specific computer advice, not snark from people looking to talk about themselves off-topic in my thread. How you do your backups has no bearing on how to negotiate my particular issue.

That said, does anyone know whether FAT-32 is an ideal format for a drive that will be exclusively working from a PC? I've heard for large sizes (e.g.: 2TB) that it's unstable and not ideal.

gizmo8899 said:

Please keep your sarcasm to yourself, then. I'm looking for honest and specific computer advice, not snark from people looking to talk about themselves off-topic in my thread. How you do your backups has no bearing on how to negotiate my particular issue.

That said, does anyone know whether FAT-32 is an ideal format for a drive that will be exclusively working from a PC? I've heard for large sizes (e.g.: 2TB) that it's unstable and not ideal.

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I think XJ-Linux was just using his example as a suggested solution. If you don't want this kind of reaction, try being a little more gracious. You're not entitled to assistance here.