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The approach I use...

Posted by andy_c on September 18, 2006 at 11:07:19

In Reply to: about to give up on audio server posted by MediaSeth on September 18, 2006 at 10:17:29:

My music server is also my main PC. Its case is an Antec P180, which can hold a total of six hard drives. I use all six in the following way.

The lower chamber of the case has a basket which holds four hard drives. I have these four hard drives configured as a RAID 5 array. The basket has good sized gaps between the four drives for airflow. In that lower chamber is a fan that pulls air across the hard drives, keeping them cool. The RAID controller is a separate third-party controller, not something built in to the motherboard. If one drive of the array fails, the controller will warn me and I can replace the failed drive and rebuild the array. Of course, RAID 5 does not protect you when more than one drive fails at once, or some other catastrophic failure.

Then I have two IDE hard drives. The first one holds the OS and all the apps. However, I store no application data on the IDE drive. That all goes on the RAID array. The second hard drive holds an image of the first, created with Acronis True Image. That backup takes 12 minutes, and I do it every day. If the OS backup drive fails, it can just be replaced with no ill effects. If the OS drive fails, it can be replaced, then the image restored from the OS backup drive using a bootable CD created by Acronis True Image.

For "ultra critical" data such as taxes, I just back that up to CD or DVD from the RAID array in case of a catastrophic failure of the array.

I don't claim that this approach is perfect by any means. But it gives ma a lot of protection for very little work. One key I've found to a good backup strategy is that it should be easy and quick enough that you will actually do it regularly.

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