Question of RAIDs and How to Set Them Up?

[nphsbuckeye]

Hello, I just assembled my new machine yesterday and want to back up everything from the internal 1TB drive and my external 1TB drive. Currently, all of my photos and music are on my external, but as soon a Santa Claus, err, the UPS man delivers the wireless card, I'll set up my computer with all the external drives and whatnot. That's the general background.

However, for copying files from one drive to another for exact replicas, how would that be done? After I copy the files from the external to internal, could I set up the external to copy all changes from the internal? Can you please enlighten me on how to have two exact drives? Danke schoen.

[tim]

This has nothing to do with RAID. Just use SyncToy to do the copy.

[nphsbuckeye]

Thanks, I was going through my mobo manual and it was talking about RAIDs, but gave a rather bad definition of it, so I wanted some clarity.

[tim]

RAID is basically for either redundancy or performance from internal disks. External disks are completely different. Synctoy is apparently the easiest way to do a regular mirror to an external disk, I use Robocopy but it's command line and not the easiest to use.

[Duncan Frenz]

RAID is basically for either redundancy or performance from internal disks. External disks are completely different. Synctoy is apparently the easiest way to do a regular mirror to an external disk, I use Robocopy but it's command line and not the easiest to use.

Not 'user' friendly, but wonderfully powerful.

[Socket7]

Tim is correct, RAID is not what you want. But I'll give you some info on it anyways in case you're curious. You might even like some of its abilities.

RAID stands for Redundant Array Of Inexpensive (or Interdependent) Disks

It's a method of hooking up multiple drives inside a computer so the computer sees it as one big drive, and gives you the ability to gain increased performance or fault tolerance.

The most common RAIDS these days are Stripes and mirrors. (RAID 0 and 1 respectively)

A RAID 0 Stripe, using 2, 1TB drives would be seen by the computer as a 2TB drive. It would also be marginally faster then a single 2TB drive. The downside of this is that if one of the two drives fail, you loose all the data on both drives, because the computer does not distinguish between the two physical disks.

A RAID 1 mirror would take 2, 1TB drives and show the OS a single 1TB drive. The second drive keeps an exact mirror of all the data on the first, This gives you fault tolerance as if one drive dies, all your data is still backed up. a RAID mirror is a very secure way of storing all your data.

There is also RAID 5, which uses 3 physical disks and each disk stores parity data for the other 2 drives. If one drive fails, you can replace it, and rebuild the data from what is on the other 2 good drives. It nets you a bit more storage space then a mirror does, and slightly better performance depending on what you're doing, but is mostly used in servers.

I keep all my data on a RAID 1 array in my computer. I don't worry about my hard drive failing and me losing all my data anymore. However, I still back up all my data. A RAID array will not protect your data from a lightning strike. A DVD backup will.

[tim]

I don't worry about my hard drive failing and me losing all my data anymore. However, I still back up all my data. A RAID array will not protect your data from a lightning strike. A DVD backup will.

So will backing up to an external disk keep offsite, unless you keep the disk on top of a roof ;) DVD backups aren't practical any more, they're too small.

[Socket7]

So will backing up to an external disk keep offsite, unless you keep the disk on top of a roof ;) DVD backups aren't practical any more, they're too small.

A dual Layer DVD is enough for all my most important stuff. The rest gets dumped onto an encrypted 400 GB drive which is only connected to the PC when doing backups.

But I'm paranoid and do these things for fun.

[tim]

You have a strange idea of fun! I just mirror everything to a 1.5TB external drive which I store offsite. I wouldn't bother with DVDs at all, i'd use S3 or something first - though uploading 4GB takes a while, so DVDs aren't a bad solution. I just don't like them as in my experience they fail more often than hard drives.

[nphsbuckeye]

Thanks for the info guys. Synctoy looks like what I'm looking for. I only have one internal HDD, so no point for RAID - but good info for the future.

[joeseph]

So will backing up to an external disk keep offsite, unless you keep the disk on top of a roof ;)
This (http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~duncanc/Odd/3E7C9964-850.jpg) is a very good reason to have an offsite backup...

(shot taken 4 houses away from me a week or so ago)