[d0ubled0wn]

Well, I've never messed with RAID before. Since I'm terrible about making backups on a regular basis and I don't have much space left on my two drives, I decided to buy two 160GB drives and set up software RAID 1. I did my homework, it should be bootable from my MDD G4 dualie.

This is the plan:
• set up each drive on a seperate IDE channel
• use disk utility to create the RAID 1 mirror
• copy current boot drive to the new RAID
• boot from the new RAID. done.

It's steps 3 and 4 I'm not sure about. What is the best way to copy partition to partition? And once this step is done, I assume the new RAID will show up in the Startup Disk control panel, right?

Anything I should be wary of with this set up?

TIA

[Brass]

Step 3 is the only tricky bit. You need to copy in such a way as to make sure the new version is bootable. The best way to do that is with a utility such as Carbon Copy Cloner, or whatever it's called.

[tooki]

Please remember that mirroring only prevents you from one type of data loss: drive failure. It is NOT a substitute for backups, because it doesn't prevent you from things like the following:

- user error
- program error
- operating system error
- disk corruption (it will be dutifully mirrored!)
- catastrophic damage (fire, theft, etc)

Only an off-site backup can protect you from all those things!

tooki

[C.J. Moof]

Yep. You're probably at least 100x more likely to loose a file due to a software glitch or human error than you are a drive dying. In 6 years as a syadmin, I've had one HD up and croak, but have done hundreds of restore from tape to undo human error. People delete things, flatten the PS file or discard color info and save, when they really meant Save As....
Just last week I messed up a config file on a server with a RAID 1 on it, and was dumb enough to not duplicate it before I started tweaking. It was the tape that got me back in order.

The RAID 1 is a good idea, but it's not going to protect you from the most likely failure point.

That said, I'd use CCC to move from your current setup to your new RAID.

[SMacTech]

I agree with C.J. I too am a sys admin, and the number of drives that have failed in 10 yrs I can count on my hand. This is with 100 users and 10 servers and new computers every two years. So about 1% of the drives have failed. RAID 1 is not made to be a backup, because if you delete a file, it too will be deleted on the mirror. RAID 1 is good for a quick roll-over of the data to the mirror drive should one fail.
The tape drive is my best friend, as it is for others in the company when they come and say ' i accidentally deleted blah... ' I also do as tooki said, off site backup using robocopy on Windows 2000 server, via our T1 to our warehouse where I have remote backup.
Also, another vote for CCC, it works really good, when you use it right.

[d0ubled0wn]

Drive failure is my biggest concern. I've probably owned maybe 10 or so hard drives over the past 15 years and had one go bad (it was on a Dell, go figure.) The drive failure happened within a month of owning it. 1 in 10 is not good odds.

Three months ago my PC at work had a hard drive failure and I lost some valuable data. We are expected to know to keep valuable data on the network drives which are backed up, not our own PC drives. I wore a dunce cap that day.

I've never lost data due to corruption. I've probably lost 1 or 2 files from accidental deletion but nothing major. So, I'm not really too concerned about that. But I will gain some peace of mind with a RAID mirror setup. I intend to backup the really valuable files to CD-RW every few months, in case of theft.

CCC sounds like what I need. Thanks for the help.

[diamondsw]

Originally posted by d0ubled0wn:
Drive failure is my biggest concern. I've probably owned maybe 10 or so hard drives over the past 15 years and had one go bad (it was on a Dell, go figure.) The drive failure happened within a month of owning it. 1 in 10 is not good odds.

Three months ago my PC at work had a hard drive failure and I lost some valuable data. We are expected to know to keep valuable data on the network drives which are backed up, not our own PC drives. I wore a dunce cap that day.

I've never lost data due to corruption. I've probably lost 1 or 2 files from accidental deletion but nothing major. So, I'm not really too concerned about that. But I will gain some peace of mind with a RAID mirror setup. I intend to backup the really valuable files to CD-RW every few months, in case of theft.

CCC sounds like what I need. Thanks for the help.

Um, if you set up RAID you don't have to perform the initial copy. In fact, it's probably best that you don't. Just allow the OS to build the RAID set by itself - it will do it correctly, whereas you may not (and then it will just have to rewrite everything).

However, as someone who has dealt with both logical and physical drive loss, I have to agree that the chances of physical drive loss are astronomically smaller than logical drive loss. Go ahead and do RAID-1, but do a separate offline backup as well...

[d0ubled0wn]

Originally posted by diamondsw:
Um, if you set up RAID you don't have to perform the initial copy. In fact, it's probably best that you don't. Just allow the OS to build the RAID set by itself - it will do it correctly, whereas you may not (and then it will just have to rewrite everything).

Well, I want to copy my existing 80GB boot drive to my 160GB RAID set, which will become my boot volume. Are you saying I should add the 80GB to the RAID set and let the OS sync it up? Won't I end up with just an 80GB RAID instead of 160?

[diamondsw]

Originally posted by d0ubled0wn:
Well, I want to copy my existing 80GB boot drive to my 160GB RAID set, which will become my boot volume. Are you saying I should add the 80GB to the RAID set and let the OS sync it up? Won't I end up with just an 80GB RAID instead of 160?

Oops. I'm going to go get more sleep now.

[d0ubled0wn]

Yes, sleep is good.