Advice regarding RAID setup

[richorlin]

Is there any advantage to using a RAID setup comprised of two 500GB drives when backing up using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!? Or would a plain clone of the drive to a single 500gb drive suffice?

Thanks, all

[Harbourmaster]

RAID 0 or 1 ??

RAID Zero would give you some potential added speed with the posibility of total loss of data should one of the drives in the array fail.

RAID One gives you a duplicate of your backup in case one of the drives in the array fails.

[papercup]

I don't think you can boot from a RAID backup, that would be a huge disadvantage.

[M A V I C]

If it's a backup, you don't need a RAID as you already have redundancy. If what you want is to store files that aren't kept elsewhere, you'd want a RAID1 for two drives.

[deckeda]

Aside from the initial copy, subsequent backups are hopefully setup incremental. So extra speed isn't really beneficial in a SOHO environment.

And RAID 1, if setup as an automatic mirror, sounds great until you realize that when you save your document, and it's wrong, or corrupt, so is the mirrored copy.

If you've got a second backup drive, just backup to both. That way you have 2 or three copies (3 if your working drive also stores data.)

[M A V I C]

[quote deckeda]Aside from the initial copy, subsequent backups are hopefully setup incremental. So extra speed isn't really beneficial in a SOHO environment.
I have one backup of about 100GB that, although it may only copy over 5MB of data, still takes 15 minutes to complete. This is because it verifies all the source and target files to see what changed. That's over Gb with fast drives on both ends.

So unless he has a few hours to run it, he should pay attention to speed.

[jdc]

is that a bootable backup MAVIC?

i have 2 400 gig drives in a single case that are set for nightly incremental backups

might have a gig + of new data nearly every day, and i dont think it takes more than just a few minutes for superduper to do its thing. used silverkeeper before, same times

but -- this is data only -- no system, applications and not bootable

[M A V I C]

Not bootable, but all the permissions are checked and copied correctly.

How much data are you doing incremental backups on, jdc?

[jdc]

its a 400 gig drive with about 320 gigs on it, does the backup to an identical 400 gig drive

as far as i know, SD checks the permissions as well when copying -- are you using SD?

[M A V I C]

[quote jdc]its a 400 gig drive with about 320 gigs on it, does the backup to an identical 400 gig drive

as far as i know, SD checks the permissions as well when copying -- are you using SD?
No, I'm using CCC 3.0.1.