Raid1 vs General Back

[gTumba]

I'm a photographer and have lots of photos I don't want to lose. I was thinking of adding 2 x 1TB Harddrives and running them in Raid1? I was wondering if anyone would recommend this over having two hard drives and backing up maybe every week or so. Or if anyone had any general backup workflow and hard drive setup suggestions.

 

[sublifer]

I would skip RAID 1 in your case as its just another possible point of failure. I'd get the pair of drives and just run incremental backups against the one storage drive onto the other. You can do this with backup software (haven't looked in a while so I can't suggest any) or you can do a Windows scheduled task and create a batch file with an xcopy command. Just remember that if you have to take the drive to another PC in order to recover, you may have trouble if the drive was RAIDed or used proprietary backup software.

 

[wuzy]

I use both RAID redundancy (RAID5 for multi-TB cost-saving) as first line of defense and backup drives just for the RAW files as 2nd line of defense. HDD are just so prone to failure I wouldn't put the risk of depending just on the backup drives in case they fail as well out of the 1/million-th chance.