ughhh, Set up RAID 1, backup or both?

ser_renely · Feb 15, 2018

Bear with me....I have two 3tb HDD and can't t figure out if I want to use the backup approach or RAID 1 approach... or both. I can't really figure out the best option for personal use, which would be backing up mainly photograph images.

If I want to set it up as a non-bootable RAID 1 to store images: I have an AMD ASROCK b350 board , which has a RAID controller, do I want to use that or have Windows 10 manage the RAID?

If I wanted to use the back up approach would I have to buy a program to manage that? Is a backup of images roughly the same size as the original? So if I has 2tb of images would the back up be close to 2tb?

I am not sure if my question is clear, bc I am sure I am missing something

Any other options/suggestions would be appreciated as well.

Thanks,
Ser

USAFRet · Feb 15, 2018

1. RAID 1 is not a backup
2. Backing up to another drive in the same system is only marginally better than a RAID 1.
3. See #1

If this is just personal use, there are much better ways of protecting your data.
Personally, I use Macrium Reflect
As referenced here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

A lot depends on what you are trying to protect, and protect against.

geofelt · Feb 15, 2018

The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years. SSD's are similar.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, raid controller failure fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, and can tolerate some recovery time, you do not need raid-1

To keep it simple, you might buy a usb enclosure for one of your drives.
Whenever you want to update your backup, connect/turn on that external drive and do a backup.
When done, disconnect it.

From time to time, make an extra copy of what you value and send it offsite to protect against such things as flood/fire...

You could use windows backup which is free.
I suspect you might get some suggestions for more sophisticated backup apps.

While backups will usually be compressed, photos are already compressed, so I would not expect much size difference.

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ughhh, Set up RAID 1, backup or both?

ser_renely

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USAFRet

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geofelt

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