nadelewitz wrote:
At the risk of opening a can of worms again on UHH.....
RAID is not backup. Mirror drives are not the same as making copies of a drive.
Reasons:
1. A RAID drive is most commonly NOT readable outside its RAID array. The RAID controller typically creates proprietary-format drives that are only readable in the RAID array they were
created by. There ARE exceptions to this, but you cannot know unless you take a drive from your RAID array and connect it via USB to a computer and (try to) read it. Please don't argue with ME. A little cursory research on the Web will find many discussions of this. I thought RAID mirroring was the way to go with my NAS, until I had to read one of the mirrors separately and could not, in Windows, Linux, Mac operating systems. The drive was NOT a recognizable format.
2. If there is a drive error (it's starting to fail for example), accidental/mistaken deletion, a virus or other data-related issue, the effects/problems are instantly replicated to the second (third, fourth...) drive instantly. So you have defective mirrors. Not exactly what you want, is it?
BACKING UP means making a copy of a drive's contents onto another drive with a sync program, or manually. This way, you decide when to do the backing-up, knowing FIRST that the data drive is good.
What you are doing is NOT protecting your critical data.
At the risk of opening a can of worms again on UHH... (
show quote)
In my opinion you are only partially correct. if the RAID controller is in the raid, then that raid can be moved from computer to computer. If the raid is set up as redundant or backup then the drive can be moved to another computer and read. This would be a raid 1. Each disc is a mirror of the first one in a raid 1.this is done but writing to all disk at the same time with the same data.
In a RAID 0 the data is split up between all the disks and is used for faster reads and wrights, no mirroring is done. If one drive fails you lose some of your data. but if you have a raid array of four drives that equals say one terabyte you can back that raid up to another drive with software, then you haven't read for fast read write and a backup.
As far as backing up goes you're correct. When you backup or copy a disc to another one you copy the viruses and everything, thus the need for continuous virus protection on the system.
At least that's the way I understand it.