Computer Audio Asylum

Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

+1 Minimize complexity w/o compromising data recovery

Posted by AbeCollins on March 7, 2017 at 17:48:32:
Some folks have a false sense of security with mirrored disks in the computer and an external RAID/NAS. There's no substitute for multiple backup strategies... and RAID is not a "backup".
A RAID may save one from a disk failure but if the RAID system itself goes belly up having a row of good disks in the RAID chassis is of no use. In a typical consumer RAID there are several single points of failure, the most obvious being the RAID controller and power supply. If I had a small RAID system in my home, I would still need to back it up. It's much easier IMHO to just maintain a few different backups w/o the RAID.
Mirrored boot disks in the computer are fine but if you use those mirrored disks for anything else other than the OS, and human error or other corruption occurs, all you've done is made another copy of the problem on the 2nd disk. ;-)
I maintain a few different backups to external USB disks using different methods including Carbon Copy Cloner for fully bootable backups. If my internal Mac disk dies, I just boot up from the external disk and carry on until I fix/replace the internal disk. I do this on my music server as well as my work laptop.
Time Machine makes incremental backups with the ability to recover data from different points in time like an hour ago, a few hours ago, yesterday, a few days ago, a week ago, etc. etc. If I mistakenly make a change to a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, I can count on Time Machine to take be back to a version before my changes were made.
I also sync all the folders on my desktop to an external USB disk that is formatted with the MS-DOS FAT filesystem. If my work Mac dies completely, I can attach this USB disk to another Mac or even a (gasp!) Windows PC and have instant access to my latest and most important work related activities.
And if that's not enough, my work laptop has a backup agent running on it which backs it up over the internet to two separate servers at "corporate" whenever I'm on the company network via VPN.
Additionally, we have iCloud backups for all of our iPhones, iPads, and certain Apps and data that cross over to our Macs including Calendar entries, Contacts, Reminders, spread sheets, presentations, etc. If I break or lose my iPhone, the provisioning of a new one would include fully restoring all of that data to the new iPhone.... seamlessly over wifi or the cellular data network. A lot of this data is also accessible to me via a web browser on any computer. None of my music is in iCloud... I have too much so I just use my USB disks.
The point is to have multiple backup and recovery methods. I have several that 'overlap'. And as you know, a RAID/NAS is not a backup. Much of the above is automated to "minimize complexity".