Backup Online

MarkFromCornwall

byronwells wrote: »

Now I am wondering if I should get another physical one or really start thinking about doing it online instead? Where should I go to find the best deals for that?

Personally I have more confidence in external hard drives than I do in the Cloud. As you've discovered, having just one isn't good enough, but they are relatively cheap so I have two. They are never both connected to the computer at the same time and one is kept in a separate location. That's good enough for my needs. If my data was more valuable I'd have more than two and make sure that one of them was kept in a fireproof safe and off-site. By the way, you were unlucky, these things are incredibly reliable!

mgfvvc

arciere wrote: »

Sorry, I think we are talking about two different things. When you say 'as long as it's copied to the mirrored NAS', what do you mean? You have one drive (say USB), plus you have a NAS unit that you regularly use to take backups? If that's the case, RAID is not involved, and mirroring is just an action that can be performed either manually or scheduled. That's a backup.
RAID1 (commonly known as mirror), is a RAID system (that can be used on NAS units as well as computers) that simply mirrors the content of all disks. You have no control over this. THIS is not a backup solution. So if you are only using a NAS unit with 2 drives in it (or even 5), you are not having a backup plan.

I'm talking about backups to a NAS with mirrored disks, so the backups on the NAS are protected from a single disk failure by duplication. It's not a backup solution in itself, but it is one element of it.

arciere

mgfvvc wrote: »

I'm talking about backups to a NAS with mirrored disks, so the backups on the NAS are protected from a single disk failure by duplication. It's not a backup solution in itself, but it is one element of it.

In that case the fact that you have one disk plus another copy in another device (NAS, SAN, USB drive or whatever) is the backup, having or not a RAID array is irrelevant.
I was talking about RAID-1, some people believe that having a RAID 1 system protects against data loss.

Aaron.R

Just to go online, makes life so much easier and you dont have to fear losing data when something breaks down