Here is the problem exactly. RAID protects you from hardware failures
of the disk drive. It does not protect you from hardware failures of
the RAID controller, the motherboard, memory or any of a gazillion
software problems or failures of humanity that are far more likely to
cream your data. As to Microsoft utilities I have very bad memories of
SCANDISK in 1993 turning a disk with some minor damage into a total loss.
My backup methodolody use two external USB drives. One of them is a
duplicate drive created by running a Seagate utility (comes with new
Seagate drives) that creates a bootable dupe or your original drive.
The purpose of the utility is to enable you to duplicate your original
drive on a supposedly larger drive that you've bought from Seagage. It
will natter at you if the new drive is not a Seagate drive but will
dutifully perform its work anyhow. It also doesn't like the fact that
it's talking to an IDE drive via a USB conversion but can be fooled into
ignoring that. That creates copy #1 and I run that about once/month.
The second backup is a simple copy that started life as a bootable drive
like #1 but is kept updated by running incremental backups on it via
that most wonderful tool SyncBack. If I was running Win XP I could keep
drive #2 bootable as it started out but, with Win2000, SyncBack is
unable to copy certain system files (about 17 of them) while they're in
use. As Windows installs system updates these files may be changing so
disk #2 may or may not be bootable after awhile. I run this second
backup on an irregular basis but try to remember to run it whenever I
add any significant set of new images to the hard drive.
When the Win XP replacement comes along I'll consider Win XP mature
enough to use and switch to that. Then I'll only have to run the
Seagate utility one on each disk. Heck, maybe SyncBack will be able to
do it all.
Anyhow, the lesson is, software and human error are the most likely
things to clobber your images and other precious data. Make a
controlled backup on your own schedule and limit it to times when you
think your system and data (and you) are stable.
Chuck Norcutt
Piers Hemy wrote:
> Indeed, thanks Scott. But I can't forget the experience of a friend whose
> son-in-law set up a twin HD mirrored array. Worked just fine until Win XP
> Checkdisk decided it really needed to recover the disk directory, and really
> didn't need to seek permisssion. So it went ahead to rearrange (technical
> term for "completely destroy") the directory. The disk controller duly
> mirrored the new directory. Nothing so far has succeeded in recovering the
> GBs of lost (but fully backed-up) images.
>
> I don't know what kind of mirroring was in use. I don't like to ask. I
> wouldn't want to be that son-in-law.
>
> --
> Piers
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
> Of ScottGee1
> Sent: 20 July 2006 16:33
> To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [OM] Helpful hints for RAID
>
>
> A concise summary of RAID for photographers:
>
> http://www.westcoastimaging.com/wci/page/info/photoshoptip/tip29.html
>
> hth/ScottGee1
>
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