What is the best practical home use for RAID?

[Mikensan]

On 6/5/2018 at 9:49 AM, Pixel5 said:

 

while it is correct that raid is not a backup i would still say having one disk redundancy is more than most people have and already a good protection of your data.

combine this with snapshots and you are already pretty safe against most things which is more than enough for the average user.

 

If you want to go all in you obviously want offsite backups but realistically the normal user does not need this beyond a few documents or pcitures which you could sync to google drive or amazon.

 

I'd agree with @dalekphalm.. it's worse. If you can afford a disk for parity then just use it for backups instead. In a typical RAID all disks rely on each other, when the RAID dies you lose ALL data. When the disks are independent, you only lose whats on each individual disk, and if you dedicated one for a backup then you at least have 2 copies.

 

You can argue one disk can't contain all data - I would argue you don't always need EVERYTHING backed up - be selective. You're better off backing up critical data, then praying a stripe based array never fails.

 

Without backups, better off using something like Windows Storage Spaces or something similar to FlexRAID to aggregate your storage without stripe.

[dalekphalm]

52 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

I'd agree with @dalekphalm.. it's worse. If you can afford a disk for parity then just use it for backups instead. In a typical RAID all disks rely on each other, when the RAID dies you lose ALL data. When the disks are independent, you only lose whats on each individual disk, and if you dedicated one for a backup then you at least have 2 copies.

 

You can argue one disk can't contain all data - I would argue you don't always need EVERYTHING backed up - be selective. You're better off backing up critical data, then praying a stripe based array never fails.

 

Without backups, better off using something like Windows Storage Spaces or something similar to FlexRAID to aggregate your storage without stripe.

Agreed - for example, don't backup your movies and TV shows, since you can re-rip them off the discs. But do backup wedding photos, tax documents, etc, that cannot be replaced.