External Hard Drives - Portable vs Desktop

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Also - running RAID-1 on your backups is a waste of time. Far better off to have two seperate copies, because that eliminates the possibility of file system corruption from mirroring between the backup disks.

Two disks, two enclosures, two power supplies is far better than a dual bay RAID box, for backup purposes.

Alternating backups is an ideal plan but most people want, and NEED, something to happen automatically or it wont get done. In the perfect world, I agree totally but I think that a simpler solution gets more accomplished than the one that is more work, more times than not.

I guess you could still set up a scheduled backup to 2 separate drives, but that would require software that supports that, (or 2 separate backup programs)

[calumniate]

I'm not sure if this would be cheaper, but you can also buy an internal desktop drive, then buy a case for it with firewire / usb ports. This way you can remove the HD from the case and plunk it into a desktop if the time ever comes.

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...29401(ME).aspx

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Alternating backups is an ideal plan but most people want, and NEED, something to happen automatically or it wont get done. In the perfect world, I agree totally but I think that a simpler solution gets more accomplished than the one that is more work, more times than not.

I guess you could still set up a scheduled backup to 2 separate drives, but that would require software that supports that, (or 2 separate backup programs)

True. It would also depend on what the backup is actually doing - if its whole system snapshot with no history, just jettison the RAID-1 since its not adding anything really (if the backup disk fails, its unlikely the primary will fail at the same time).

I guess what I'm actually saying is that if you're concerned enough about reliability in the backups that you'd consider RAID-1, you might as well do it properly and rotate backup sets. (although I could see deploying RAID-1 at the clueless family member's house, if its not something that is going to get maintained)

If the backups maintain multiple point in time recovery sets (eg. Time Machine on the Mac), then protecting the backups with some redundancy is probably worth it to retain the backup timeline continuity.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

True. It would also depend on what the backup is actually doing - if its whole system snapshot with no history, just jettison the RAID-1 since its not adding anything really (if the backup disk fails, its unlikely the primary will fail at the same time).

I guess what I'm actually saying is that if you're concerned enough about reliability in the backups that you'd consider RAID-1, you might as well do it properly and rotate backup sets. (although I could see deploying RAID-1 at the clueless family member's house, if its not something that is going to get maintained)

If the backups maintain multiple point in time recovery sets (eg. Time Machine on the Mac), then protecting the backups with some redundancy is probably worth it to retain the backup timeline continuity.

Thats exactly the situation I am thinking of. More often than not, the person doing these things is clueless, although not entirely because that have realize they need a backup!