Originally posted by: Blain
Originally posted by: seemingly random
I'll be keeping copies of truly irreplaceable things on both drives.
What happens if some freak power surge blasts your whole system?
Or maybe your PS zaps out, taking the rest of the rig with it?
These are certainly possibilities. However, in my experience, they are much less probable than an individual failure with current large drives. Other possibilities are theft, fire and heavy weather. Theft has occurred but not for a long time and fire seems very improbable but you never know. A tornado once came very close. Now, if I could only find some wood...
There's always the option of backup to another computer on the network but then a power surge could affect all pc's plugged in. The safest backup would be on some portable media stored in a bank lock box or something similarly off site. But then one might worry about media degeneration, among other things. So, in the end, one can only deal with probabilities.
With the amount of data we store, a file server with redundant storage is becoming more attractive and maybe necessary. All of the above scenarios are still possible to varying degrees though. I've been considering a server with four 1gb 5400rpm drives in raid n with a small ssd as the system drive - not sure about the reliability of ssd's yet or even if it's critical for a non-data drive. Procrastination might pay off since drives with 500gb platters are apparently coming soon.
Just noticed that newegg has 1tb green wd drives for $105 - $5 less than what I paid yesterday - oh well...