RAID--quick, cheap, good/fast, pick all 3

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 02:52:46PM -0400, Seth Gordon wrote:
> It seems that every time I read an introduction to RAID, the author
> puts in some disclaimer to warn that RAID should not be a
> *substitute* for making regular backups.

It depends upon how important your data is, and how much you're
willing to spend on keeping it available.  This includes labor time.
Maintaining a regular back-up scheme is time-consuming and tedious.
The average user may not want to spend the money on tapes, or the time
on actually managing the archives.  Mirroring provides a cheap, albeit
imperfect, alternative.  There are kinds of data loss which it will
not protect you from.  But then, the same is true of an off-system
archival scheme too.  Archiving data is just one aspect of Information
Assurance, which is essentially a form of risk management.  Risk
management is all about cost trade-offs...

> Of course, since I have neither, I shouldn't pick nits....

Case in point.  Mirroring is much better than doing nothing at all.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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