Raid or Back Up

F

Farrsolo

New Member
I have been researching RAID configurations and trying to determine what RAID is sufficient for my needs. basically I want a back-up of all me data and media. Documents, music, movies, pictures. I have one 2TB drive at 75% capacity of movies and shows and another 2TB drive with music/pictures and data at 75% capacity as well.

If money wasn't an issue then I would just set up a couple RAID1+0's with four 3TB WD RED's, but I don't have an extra $1000, haha.

So it struck me at work one day. I do CAD work for my company and I use Windows back up tool. I set it up to make a back up of a specific directory at 11:00am everyday, and then I do a back up manually at 3:00pm if needed.

The only possibly issue I can see, is my backup at work is only about 6GB, where my personal data is about 3-3.5TB's. Windows might bug out because of the size of the backup.

If I pick up two more 2TB drives (very cheap $$) and set up a windows back up, it could be a more ideal solution, If I ever need to restore a dead drive??

I am not concerned about the higher read/write speeds with RAID setups, I was just concerned about the complications of RAID since I have never set one up.

Thanks!
 
I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe if you set up a RAID 1 array, that you are actually mirroring your hard drive to another..meaning that if one goes bad you still can access your data if one of the hard drives goes bad. I've never ran a RAID 1 setup so I don't know what happens when one of the drives goes bad; but what I do know is that both hard drives are a mirror image of each other.
 
Yeah, raid 1 mirrors the info on drive 1 to drive 2. So if one goes bad you can always boot to the other drive. You lose speed and performance but gain redundancy.
 
johnb35 said:
Yeah, raid 1 mirrors the info on drive 1 to drive 2. So if one goes bad you can always boot to the other drive. You lose speed and performance but gain redundancy.
Click to expand...

So would it be beneficial to set up a raid then or just have a drive that is used for backing up. I heard numerous times about a Raid drive failing, so the person buys a new drive, installs it and while the raid is repairing the second drive in the raid fails. All data is lost...

Windows 7 back up tool, creates an image of the drive, so if the main drive fails or some files go corrupt then, you can do a restore.
 
I used to run a raid 1 setup and actually a drive or two went out and had to get a new one. Very seldom will 2 drives go out at the same time. As long as you have windows installation media you can buy imaging software that will create an image of your OS and programs and you can recovery it if a driver does go out. You should back up your personal data to more than one device to be safe.
 
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