Memory Which raid for back up?

Hi all,

I'm going to be building a HTPC soon which will be used for watching DVD's/Blu-rays as well as watching HD TV eventually.

How ever my question is what would be the best solution for be to back up the hard drive? I have no ideas about which raid or fully whats the best way to go about it.

Thanks for the help,
AC

 

RAID isn't backup. If you delete a file by accident, or overwrite one, or it gets corrupted, or you get infected with malware, you don't have anything to restore from, because the change has been mirrored across the array.

RAID-1 provides redundancy through mirroring.

 

RAID 1 would basically have two drives, one being a copy of the other so if one fails, you can boot from the mirror drive.

As said it doesn't protect you from accidentally deleting files. If you want protection against file accidental file deletion, there is a windows backup utility which will back up all your data + changes to the data to another hard disk.

 

what would be the best solution to back it up then?

 

For a backup I'd just mirror it to another drive once in a while, and wouldn't bother with normal RAID. Proper backup is rather expensive really, the golden rule for a reasonable budget backup is that hard drives simply aren't robust enough to be a proper backup.

If you wanted a performance boost and redundancy I'd say RAID5 every time.

 

+1 on this.

If you are using Windows 7 as an o/c, avoid Windows Backup like the plague - very, very, very, very slow.

A simple and "set and forget" way would be to install two identical drives in your HTPC, buy Acronis True Image Home 2010 (£27 normally, you can get it for about £21-£23 with voucher codes) and set it to backup your data to the second drive, on a regular schedule, in the background - it hardly uses any resources. That way your data is on two different drives. If one fails, you still have it. If you delete something inadvertantly, you can get it back easily.

If it was me, I would also use the same software to backup to an external hard drive as well, just maybe not as often.

There is probably other software you can use to di the same thing but cheaper.

 

Or back up to RAID5... redundancy and back up cheesecake!

Interesting comment on hard drives not being a suitable back up medium. I would challenge that. If your back up is on a RAID5 array, I can think of nothing better for home use. Optical discs are useless, slow, and far to easy to damage, and have terrible archival qualities. What else is there?

 

RAID, no matter what flavour, can still get corrupted. Two RAID arrays, one for storage and one for dedicated backup is the best way (e.g. rsync between the two) - as long as you don't back up corrupted data

...but to answer the OP's question, by all means mirror your PC hard drives, it will protect you against a single disk failure. However, use another hard drive to back up to on a regular basis. If the backup hard drive is a RAID array as well, all the better, but for home purposes, backing up a single RAID mirror to an external hard drive is probably sufficient. The more physically seperate spindles your data is on, the better protected you are.

 

A really simple method is to grab an external hard drive and buy acronis backup software. It will take a while, but can be scheduled to run overnight. There are external 2TB drives out there for under £100.

Depending who you are, it might be easier than running multiple RAIDs.

 

Not over eSATA it won't

 

My 2 pennies:

Get 3 F3 1TBs in RAID 5 (its what I have), then split the resulting 1.8TB into 2 or more partitions, so you haveone as your main partition and one as backup. This way you can loose 1 drive and the system wont fail, and 2 drives but still recover the data.

 

You mean have the boot partition on the RAID? I wouldn't do that. If the RAID becomes corrupt for some reason.... not drive failure.. then you've lost everything. RAID may offer redundancy, but that doesn't mean it's foolproof. Have a separate drive for the boot partition, and back it up to the RAID. Then if the RAID goes down, you have still got a working system while you repair it.

 

@pookeyhead is there a solution that would utilise Acronis True Image Home 2010 or similar software that could be use to back up the hard drive over eSATA as the case i am going with at the moment can only fit in one 3.5 Hard drive.

 

Nah, its all good, I have lots of old drives kicking around to use if that happens. Plus I'm waiting for SSDs to reach my price range, then I'll be sorting it.

 

I make all my backup with Acronis using an eSata drive sh you should be fine, just make sure the drive is on and running before starting acronis