Re: Rack Mount 4U - Lots of Drives?

[Kim Wall <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Phil Dye wrote:

> That's because RAID is no substitute for backups; it can in many
> circumstances avoid the need for them, but that doesn't mean they
> shouldn't exist. Controllers can die, write crap all over the entire
> array, etc, or as is often the case, drives purchased at the same time
> from the same batch will fail at around the same time.

Or, more likely: human error.  RAID's great until you do a sloppy "rm
-rf *" in the wrong directory, or MSWord decides to do something
irreparably clever to your document.  I used to use RAID1 on my
fileserver, until I discovered the joy of  rsync (see
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/).

Incremental backups have a lot of advantages over RAID in a SOHO
environment, where the ability to dig up a copy of a file as it was last
Tuesday outweighs the improved reliability or potential performance
gains of RAID.  Of course, if budget allows there's no reason you can't
use both :)


kim.