it halves the odds as a rule
baring software problems

in your ide raid setup if one hdd dies (generally) the computer will
shutdown anyway or freze or some such so anyway all you have to do is pull
the drive and restart and its running again. no data loss just a bit of
time. you can also rebuild the array pretty quick. if you get a high end ide
raid card you can do all that while online, no data loss, no down time (bit
of a performance hit while rebuilding the array) persionally i think the 3
drive raid (2 drives + parity) gives you the best
performance/reliability/cost ratio.

at home we have 3 computers, 2 desktops and a router, important stuff that
is messed with all the time is backed up via network onto the router at
shutdown (IE every night) with straight xcopy. less often messed around with
stuff is done via removeablle hdd

archiving is done with compression onto 2 identical cd-r's (we have
bucketloads of csv files (think tens of GB) which with winrar we get
something daft like 99% compression) which are then taken offsite.

I don't bother backing up the OS it only takes a few hours to do a reinstall
and get everything up to date.

-----Original Message-----
From: pic microcontroller discussion list
[mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of William Chops Westfield
Sent: Sunday, April 11, 2004 12:21 PM
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: [OT:] Backup Software - Your favorites?


On Saturday, Apr 10, 2004, at 13:44 US/Pacific, Jason S wrote:

> If you're going with 2 hard drives anyway, get the RAID controller;
> it's even cheaper than Total Commander.  Configure the 2 drives for
> Raid 1 (mirroring).

Of course, this does little to protect your data from whole-computer
catastrophies like fire, flood, theft, nasty viruses or runaway
software, 2-year-olds, etc...  A drive identical to the one you have
your data on can hold SEVERAL backups in a non-raid configuration
(external, IDE bay, some other system...)

Raid gives you (in theory, anyway) the ability to recover more quickly,
but I don't think I believe that anything short of the multi-drive (5?)
redundant error correcting version is really very helpful.  More often,
it just doubles your chances of something going wrong (2 drives...)

BillW

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