Solved Jim G

I have 2 320 GB disk drives and have RAID running. Do I need to run any form of backup since RAID is making a copy of one drive unto the other? I do have a Recovery DVD set of 3. I have been faithfully doing a full backup every 6 months with monthly incremental backups but I suddenly realized these backups may be reduntant. Please give me some advise on this situation.

Hello Jim and welcome to the forums

What makes you think these backups would be redundant?

Another thing I suggest is to have another hard drive, perhaps 250GB, that you backup your files to every 3 months or so. You then store this drive off site, perhaps in a family/friends house. This is to prevent data loss in the occurrence of a fire - well you will lose files, but at the most you will only lose 3 months worth of files

Tom

I believe they are reduntant because Raid puts a copy of disk A onto disk B contantly. The full backup I perform onto DVD is done every 6 months and is a copy of disk A. Why not just use the RAID setup instead of a full backup onto DVD. The only situation I'm not covering is a fire. I'm open to changing because I don't know for sure if I'm right. Please let me know what you think.

I'm leaving for 1 weeks vacation, so I won't reply for awhile.

Jim

The day you catch a virus you will know how useful your images are. The virus will be on both Disk A and Disk B. The same goes for any system malfunction. Your Raid really only protects you against one of the Disks breaking down - but that is the rarest case of trouble.

I personally think a Raid1 installation is pretty useless and unneccessarily slows the system down. I would use the second disk for daily images that you can schedule to run automatically in the background.

Thanks for the replies. I now have a better understanding of backups, RAID and what I must do for a safe backup strategy.

Jim:D