Backup of entire system - RAID1 vs. Mirroring vs. Backing Up vs. Restore points

Oh, boy! Thank you for this juicy question, which allows me to climb up on one of my favorite soapboxes.

First: RAID is not a backup solution. Period. RAID's relevance to data safety is that, except for RAID 0 (not really RAID), none of your data will be lost if a single disk drive fails. There's redundancy. So that protects you against a spindle failure, but not against malware, a controller failure, accidental or malicious erasure, rain or, my favorite, a three-year-old banging the machine on the wall.

Any data that you want to have available tomorrow, or even later today, should be backed up: copied to an external or removable device. A backup is no good if your backup drive is inside the computer and it rains in the window and the computer catches fire. Many people use external USB disks for backups; I personally have three empty removable-drive slots and just plug bare hard drives into them to do backups. Backup finished, remove hard drive, put it in hard drive case.

So the backup solution is to copy data to something that is not physically your computer - removable or external disk drives, tape drives, The Cloud, you have to pick. Your choice will depend in part on what you are already comfortable with, in part on cost, and in part on how important your backups are to you. I once knew a guy who made two copies of each backup and kept one at his parents' house. If, God forbid, his house burned down, he would have access to backups, albeit not recent ones.

The second choice that you have to make is which backup software. Again, the choice will be directed in part by expense, the amount of trouble you are willing to go to, and the amount of "data time" you are willing to lose. Can you afford to lose everything you did in the last week, the last day, the last hour? This answer influences the solution.

At the extreme end are continuous backup solutions that can wake up every hour, or every few minutes, find changed files and send the changes to your backup device. In this case, your backup device will be always-on, so it will be a network drive on your network or The Cloud - it must spend most or all of its time not near your computer. Many business-grade systems will only back up changed blocks of files, not the entire file, which can reduce your backup traffic drastically. Imagine backing up your email file - copying the whole thing every five minutes as opposed to only what changed.

If you can lose a day's work and recover easily, perhaps have two or three backup drives and do full backups weekly and incremental backups (everything that changed since the last full) daily. Rotate the backup drives - use one one week, the second the next week, and so forth. So you will never be overwriting your latest backup when things fail - that's a horrid fate, although rare.

There are reasons to use RAID, but I suspect that for you it would only introduce complications and risk.

On a personal note, I don't keep data on my system (C partition, even if they are on my system drive. I do full image backups of my system partition. If at any time I lose the partition, or if I get a virus, or just lousy misconfiguration, I can roll back to my last system backup and be back in business. I back up data with a different, more incremental strategy, more often. I can go months between system partition backups.

I don't think that there is one ideal strategy - a strategy depends on expense, how valuable your data is to you, how valuable lost time is to you, how much you are willing to fiddle with configuration and testing, and what you are comfortable with.

It's a bit more complicated than that. First, my SSD is only my system drive, so I can afford to do a full-disk restore. In this case, that would overwrite your hot files, which we hope you could restore from another source, but it's a risk. Second, there are still some user files and data on the system drive - not ones that you put there, but there's a lot of cache, settings, and some data that applications keep there. My model of backing it up every few months puts me at risk of losing those; I am willing to accept that risk. In fact I do it on purpose; when I add software or do upgrades I restore the previous backup, make the changes, and do a new backup. Keeps my OS "young."

If you are willing to back up every night, your plan is an excellent one. Do a full-disk "image" backup every night. This will capture the system, the hidden boot / recovery partition, and your user data. If your drive fails entirely, you put in a blank one, do a full-disk restore (important: not a file restore, a full-disk restore) and your machine will boot with slightly stale user files.

Note: I strongly recommend that you TEST the procedure. Back up your system disk, remove it tenderly, store it safely. Put in a blank disk (OK, a second m.2 SSD for this procedure would be a ridiculous expense, try a regular ssd but not a HDD) and restore your backup to it. If your system runs and your data is there, it works. One __must__ test recovery procedures. Imagine if you did backups religiously for a year and then, in an emergency, found that the recovery did not work!

Happened at work once - we pulled backup tapes from the offsite vault and they were _blank_. Not damaged or unreadable, blank.

I don't have an opinion on that, sorry. Acronis True Image is known to be a good business tool, but requires spending real dollars.