[MLB-WIRELESS] Data Recovery tools?

[Ryan A.]

For my fathers work computer I setup RAID mirroring however I put one of 
the drives in a 5.25" removable caddy bay.  Each night he takes that 
drive home with him so if the building burns to the ground he's still 
got a copy of the mirrored data.

A few times over the years the mirror set has shat itself and needs to 
be recreated, easy for someone with a reasonable level of computer 
knowledge though.

-Ryan

On 23/03/2010 8:46 AM, Tim Hogard wrote:
> .....
> The most common major failure is when the disk dies so RAID has become more
> popular but it seems to me that RAID controlers are only
> slightly less likely to die than hard drives that run 24x7.  It also has
> no advantage for fire, flood or lightning damage which will kill all the
> copies at once.  So far I'm not sure I know of a situation where RAID has
> helped a home user since it complicates everything.
>
> To protect agsint total destruction, you need an off site backup.  Modern drives
> are just too big to copy except onto another drive so the only real option is
> to copy the raw disk image from the internal computer to an exteranl disk.  There
> are tricks to speed that up, but a full copy means you just verified your existing
> disk is readable.  The problem then becomes what happens when your main disk fails
> when your doing a copy?  So you need at least two backup disks.
>
> My solution is I rsync stuff to a server that I have located in a data center in
> earthquake prone LA, copy nice to have data to DVDs, rsync working documents between
> my laptop and home system and then use time machine to keep track of historical
> changes.
>
> For businesses (and more and more people now), there is a 5th reason to copy
> things and that is for offical record keeping archives.  I think paper printouts
> work best for that in most situations.
>
> -tim
>    
>