Digital BW, The Print

Ken,
I think your off on the wrong foot with this.. I certainly agree that the word Raid does not equal back up.. But  Raid setups or systems as part of a back up plan certainly functions as just that,  a part of a back up plan.. In truth CD's and DVD's, Tape Drives , flash drives ..you name it they can all be part of a back up plan..

In my environment I have simply made a choice to use primarily hard drives as my vehicle of back up for data.. In truth we have a fairly good back up plan over all I think.. Using Raid driven redundancy is part of that plan.. We do not operate our computers off it .. It is merely a storage and back up plan which we find to have proven advantages over other ways of doing it..
 
It appears that your post doesn't address the possibility of using Raid as part of a back up plan... You are correct in that all it primarily does is protect against hard drive failure but it also really speeds thing up also if your set up to do so. So in truth ..a raid set up can be used as part of or not part of a back up plan.. Are you suggesting that it can't be that way?

jimbo
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: kwalsh74 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2011 10:11 AM
  Subject: [Digital BW] Re: Anyone backing up their files online?


    

  Just to add a little more to the discussion, remember a key point:

  RAID is not a backup!!!!

  RAID protects against just one thing, hard drive failure. That is it. That is not necessarily even the most likely failure, just one of the common ones. Your OS could thrash your entire array. Your RAID controller could thrash your entire array (actually saw this happen to someone). You could accidentally delete/overwrite/format your own data (did this to myself once, fortunately the data loss was not very large and could be recreated with work). A virus could corrupt all your data (saw someone do this to their work group's network mounted drive, lots of unhappy campers). And so on.

  Now, RAID is probably better than not backing up at all. And similarly if it is something that happens automatically whereas another backup option is one you must manually do and frequently don't then it has benefit. But it really isn't intended as, nor does it function particularly well as a backup. It only protects you from hard drive failure, and that is only one threat to the data.

  And it is certainly worth consulting this site to get one's mind in the right place about backing up:

  http://www.taobackup.com/

  Ken



  

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