RAID 1 vs Active Backup

[jeremyscalpello]

Hi! I've just bought 2 3TB WD Red drives for storage, and I want to use one to backup the other. My motherboard naively supports RAID 1, so I can set the 2 drives up as a mirrored array. What are the pros and cons of this versus active backup software like Genie Timeline?

Also, on the RAID 1 array, if 1 of the drives were to fail, do I just boot off of the good drive or do I have to get another drive before I can access my data?

 

[hmmblah]

RAID is not a backup. You can set up RAID 1, but you should still use some external backup. An active backup is not a good backup either. Ideally you want an external solution that you disconnect when a backup completes. Both RAID and an active backup are only protecting you from a single drive failure. If a virus or other malicious software gets installed on your machine and wipes everything out, the mirrored drive would be wiped out as well and most likely your active backup will be gone too.

Edit: And to answer your question about the mirror, yes if one drive physically fails you should be able to boot from the other drive. The RAID will be in a degraded state until you replace the bad drive.

 

[jeremyscalpello]

OK, so in that case, do you recommend putting my other drive in an external enclosure, and backing up to it every few days? What would you do?

 

[Master&Puppet]

Personally I use an external HDD but in your situation I'd get and e-sata or SATA to USB caddy to mount your internal HDD externally.

There are no rules about backing up data as such. Critical personal information I backup ASAP. Other things like music, media and games which are less important I backup infrequently - I tend to do it when I feel like it would take too much time to recover it all. It would also depend on things like your internet - I upgraded to 100mb broadband recently and now I don't bother backing up my games because they download so fast but a month ago I had all of them backed up.

 

[hmmblah]

OK, so in that case, do you recommend putting my other drive in an external enclosure, and backing up to it every few days? What would you do?

That's the safest bet. I would do that before I'd use that second drive for RAID 1. Better still would be to do RAID 1 with the two drives and grab another drive plus an enclosure for backups. That way you'd be protected against a single drive failure plus have your data backed up. I use RAID 1 on my home server with a drive in an external eSATA enclosure for backups. When the backup is finished I disconnect the drive from the server. I only backup a few times a month at home.