Solved Jim G

[jgodfrey]

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.

 

[tom982]

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

 

[jgodfrey]

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

 

[whs]

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.

 

[jgodfrey]

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