Quote:
Originally Posted by SpicyM
Why dont you have RAID? Setup for drive mirroring and if one of them dies, the other one is ready with the same data.
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RAID is for intended for maintaining up-time / availability ... it is
NOT for data backup.
Recovering data from RAID, even if it's a basic mirror setup, is no sure thing...
If the RAID controller (admittedly, they're much better these days) goes bad, both drives can be corrupted. Also, if the replacement drive is somewhat different / flaky, rebuilding the RAID may not go well - at best, it will just take a lot longer, but at worst, the good drive(s) could be corrupted too.
For those on a tight budget, an automated nightly backup to a spare drive on the server / local network is a far better approach than RAID. This is a common approach - while I'm not a big fan of it, it's light-years better than using RAID, which to reiterate, is not backup.
More ideal are the various managed backup services that many hosts offer - doing backups right takes effort so it will add some noticeable cost. Be sure that databases are backed up too - most hosts these days have a clue and do so by default, but best to verify to avoid nasty surprises later.
Ron