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  #1  
Old 08-19-2008, 08:09 AM
peterm1 peterm1 is offline
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Raid 1 versus two drives with SuperDuper?

I currently have two 500GB drives set up in my Mac Pro in a Raid 1 array solely to store my photos. In the not too distant future, these drives will be full and I would like to replace them with two 1TB drives. I was planning to set them up in a RAID drive again, but since I have SuperDuper I was wondering if there is an advantage to using it instead of a Raid configuration to copy files from one drive to another. I don't need immediate second-by-second backup. If something catastrophic happens to one drive, is it easier to deal with the situation and access and copy the still working drive if the drives were copied using SuperDuper versus using Raid? (I realize I would lose any files since the last SuperDuper backup).

Thanks!

Peter
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Old 08-19-2008, 08:21 AM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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Well, what it would do is protect you against making mistakes. A RAID is going to give you, as you said, second-by-second duplication -- so, disk corruption (non-hardware) is going to be replicated across both, as will file deletion/overwrite/etc.

The SD! backup would avoid these things. But it obviously wouldn't recover from a single-volume hardware failure as quickly, because in a typical RAID you could just swap drives and have it rebuild without any downtime.
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Old 08-19-2008, 11:09 AM
peterm1 peterm1 is offline
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One follow up question...

Thank you for the quick reply. So you are saying that if I am using RAID and replace a failed drive with a new drive, the RAID system would copy over the files from the drive that survived to the new drive a bit faster? That wouldn't be a big deal to me, since I don't keep a spare drive on hand anyway and would have to spend time going out and getting one, and the small increase in time it would take to copy over the files to a new drive using SD wouldn't mean much to me.

I am an amateur photographer so I don't have the need to have the absolute fastest recovery like a business owner would.

Thanks again - SD is a great product!

Peter
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Old 08-19-2008, 11:14 AM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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A RAID 'fixes itself': basically, if one of two drives fails, the other takes over. At that point the RAID is 'degraded' and cannot absorb another failure until it's repaired with a new drive (at which point it 're-syncs').

I use RAID drives are the destination of my backups to give myself additional protection. I also use a RAID as my startup drive, and one that stores my critical data. In fact, nearly everything of importance is both stored natively and backed up on RAID devices for protection.
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Old 08-27-2008, 12:20 PM
galfromdownunder galfromdownunder is offline
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RAID basics

Quote:
Originally Posted by dnanian View Post
A RAID 'fixes itself': basically, if one of two drives fails, the other takes over. At that point the RAID is 'degraded' and cannot absorb another failure until it's repaired with a new drive (at which point it 're-syncs').

I use RAID drives are the destination of my backups to give myself additional protection. I also use a RAID as my startup drive, and one that stores my critical data. In fact, nearly everything of importance is both stored natively and backed up on RAID devices for protection.
David,
Could you give us a simple step by step dummies guide on RAID 1 (1TB-1TB mirror) for the sticky record, and how to use it with Super Duper. I have just bought one of those 2TB Lacie Triple Interface RAID boxes to store+mirror my off-laptop data, have a Powerbook G4 working nicely with Tiger for now (if it ain't broke don't fix it), and am scratching my head as to how to set it up, with a view to using SuperDuper if applicable. For example, Disk Utility shows "Partition" and "RAID" yet the instructions ignore that RAID tab. It also shows options under Partition that don't square with what I'm seeing - they show a JBOD ("just a bunch of disks"!) as an example which doesn't appear in my pull down menu under Partition.
The Lacie manual is pretty obtuse, and talks about the enclosed Retrospect software ... how does that relate if at all.
Thanks, I am sure as we all get more and more stuff filling our small capacity drives, we'll need this info.
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Old 08-27-2008, 01:37 PM
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There's nothing tricky to do, and no need to use Disk Utility to RAID it. Instead, it has hardware RAID built in. You should set that to "mirrored", and treat it like a regular drive... the RAIDing is transparent to the user.
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