Back up your computers/data

[Legacy777]

Just thought I'd put that out there. Was messing around with Windows 7 on Friday, and accidently deleted the main partition on my laptop at home.

Not sure all of what I lost. If I can't remember...it's probably not that big a deal. I do keep all my documents and important stuff on my server, but still did lose some stuff.

I had a batch file that copied/backed up files to my server, but for some reason I didn't set it up when upgrading servers. I will be setting it up again.

[SubaruNation]

thats never fun

[BSOD2600]

Yup, until someone gets burned and looses important data, they don't start a backup regiment it seems.

oh yea, RAID5 is not a replacement for backup either.

[kimokalihi]

I was just reading a letter sent in to maximum pc magazine and the guy was saying he had his 5 hard drives in raid 5 (I think it was 5) and maximum pc said that is not a backup option.

I've never figured out how to do raid and still don't fully understand what it does except that it has the same files on each drive for speed allowing it to access different parts of the files at the same time from different drives maybe?

[Buffman]

Redundent Array of Inexpensive (now Independent) Disks. Mainly allows you to spread data accross multiple disks so that if you have a failure you can get up and running easier depending on the type of RAID you're running. it's not a back up option. Burning to Disc, writing to tape, or Writing to a seperate HD is a form of backing up. Sorry to hear Legacy. How do you like W7? It ran faster than XP did on my machine, and I actually purchased a pre-release copy that my new machine will be built around when it arrives in OCT

[fishbone79]

RAID-1 is a decent substitute for backup if correctly implemented... but I still back my server up once a week. If you setup a RAID-1 with discs of different age and 'mileage,' you're much better off than with two brand new drives.

My old server at work was a RAID-5-1, and I had a mirrored pair of Seagate's go down within 5 minutes of one another. Their serial numbers were only a couple hundred digits apart.

The value of raid is really in read/write speed, not necessarily redundancy.

Do you guys have boot arrays on windmills machines? I've switched to Linux and use mdadm, but I always wondered how well software raid works on non- *nix platforms.

sorry, geeker alert.

[BSOD2600]

My workstation at home is RAID1 (2x74GB raptors) using the Intel onboard raid controller for the OS partition. Data partition uses a 3ware 9560SE PCIe controller in RAID5 (4x500GB). Rolling weekly OS/data backups to the data array. Every month, burn a copy to dvd. And every month or two, all the data drive is backed up to various removable hard drives.

[Legacy777]

Yeah I've got RAID 5 setup on my server. It's a full blown server setup with hardware RAID. I need to pick up a tape drive.

I've got another server running RAID 1. It's IDE discs, but the drive's have been working since 2000.


As for W7. I never actually got to use it. I figured out what I did before install completed, and worked on trying to get the partition back to no avail. I'll give it another shot when I have time. Probably won't be until later in the month.