Server vs. Desktop

Not as black and white as I think you are thinking. There is software you would use for a server that no point using on a desktop. Hardware well they are generally built beefy and RAID is a must. Redundancy and reliability is critical for a server. You can build your desktop to server specs if you want. You can get a CPU designed for a server if you want. What would generally stop you is the cost and the lack of benefit even for the high end user.

I can use a desktop as a server so that would make it a server even if all be it not a good one. And a server can be used as a desktop all be it not as cost effective.

If you had the same budget and were going to build a desktop or a server your selection of components would be very different. The desktop likely would focus on performance. The server would focus on over built components and redundancy.

Server/desktop is as much hardware as it is application. Good luck.
 
In that case whats the best way to ensure I don't lose data. please don't sat backup your system I need more then that.
 
if you can afford the hardware, have your data backed up to at least 2 seperate drives, that way if one fails you haven`t lost anything
 
At the moment I have 2 tb drives I will get an ssd in the future. How do I backup? RAID? software?
 
OK well you don't want the correct answer, let's go off the ranch then. RAID1 is redundancy. It is not considered backup maybe for many reasons but the one that comes to mind is attack. All drives since mirrors of each other would all suffer the same from say a virus.

But since you pose the question as you do that is not a server vs desktop question.

If you can stay free from attack RAID1 is nice. You don't have to do anything and if a drive fails you have the other so no data loss.

You said don't say it but I have to, back up your data.:D:)
 
is there another RAID setup that could save me from ruining all my data if I get a virus?
 
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Servers uses high quality components that are more stable in general. They run Xeons and Opteron chips which are underclocked for stability reasons. Generally servers use more expensive ECC memory and RAID hard drives to provide redundancy.
 
FXB said:
is there another RAID setup that could save from ruining all my data if I get a virus?
Click to expand...

No........................Not RAID?

ECC RAM I had forgot about that. It adds stability but is a performance hit, ergo why servers use and desktops don't.
 
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Backup your data periodically. Be it daily, weekly, monthly or archival. The choice is yours.

You wanna go nuts use external and keep off site in case of fire/flood. Use on line storage but 2TB I imagine is still very expensive at this time.

Sorry I am sure not what you wanted to hear.
 
Well at this time I will stick to backing everything to my second drive which is in my case. I am never sure if Backup software actually backs up my data. If it does I don't know where it is being backed up.
 
So whats the point of having the backup software if you can't fully utilize it. Backing something up is only 30% of the battle if you ask me. 70% of it is verifying the backup scheme you have implemented works by performing a restore. I say 70% because verifying by restoring also denotes you know how to restore (and know where it is backing up to..). Simple as it sounds, how often does someone perform a restore? Not very often, so it is fairly easy to forget.

Second if you want to get a little more fancy and buy a third drive you could implement RAID 5 which would allow one or more, if you add more drives, drive to fail and the system would still stay running. Again this won't give you the option of restoring a system to a clean image in the event of a virus, like an external media back up solution could.

As others have said though, there really is no way around doing a backup. I saw someone recommend Online Backup, which has its place, but they are prone to crashes, failures, and security risks too. Unless they have some kind of insurance policy to give you some sort of compensation in the event of something bad happening. Even then I don't trust them that much.
 
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