Many photographers I know love the DROBO system. None of this means you should not use a RAID. If your house burns down… well, you get the point.Ī RAID is still a single device and because of that, also a single point of failure. A bad enough power surge will probably fry all disks in the RAID. Having all the drives in one box that is being served by one power supply and controller has its problems too. If your disk is corrupted by a software bug or virus, the corruption will be done to both mirrored copies simultaneously. So if you accidentally delete a file, it will instantly be removed from both mirrored copies.

The problem with considering a RAID as your backup is that it doesn’t help you with file deletion, corruption by applications, operating system or viruses. RAID levels 2, 3, and 4 are not commonly used anymore. Other options include RAID 6 or RAID 10, but they aren’t often found in consumer-level RAID units. This makes RAID very good for video editing systems. Since data is read from multiple disks, performance can improve under RAID 5. RAID 5 needs a minimum of three disks to implement. Since parity information is distributed across all the drives, any drive can fail without causing the entire array to fail. Parity data is a smaller amount of data derived mathematically from a larger set that can accurately describe that larger amount of data, and thus serves to restore it. RAID 5 writes and reads from multiple disks, and it distributes parity data across all the disks in the array. RAID 5: This mode is about both speed and redundancy. If either drive fails, you can continue working with the other until you can replace the bad one. RAID 1: This mode writes and reads the same data to pairs of drives which is called mirroring. RAID 0 offers no protection against drive failure, since this mode does not write any duplicate or parity information. For example, block A is on drive 1, block B is on drive 2), and this permits increased write and read speeds. RAID 0 spreads the data across multiple drives. RAID 0: Its primary purpose: faster performance. There are many different types of RAID configurations: The terms 1-disk or 2-disk redundancy refers to the number of drives that can fail with the array remaining usable. It is designed for redundancy so that the array and its data remain usable WHEN (NOT IF) a drive fails. The concept of a RAID is to combine multiple, less-expensive drives into a single, higher-capacity and/or faster volume. Period.”įor those who never heard of it, RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” or “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.” And for those who use the phrase “RAID array,” thats redundant. To borrow a quote from a fellow photographer’s blog, “Repeat after me three times: RAID is not backup. One of the first things to remember is that an archive and a backup are NOT the same. From RAID systems, like a Drobo, to triple redundant drives, to no backup at all.

Like their shooting styles, their archive/backup schemes can be just as diverse. Photographers acquire A LOT of images, and that translates to terabytes of data that need to be saved and protected. One in a waterproof Pelican case at home and the other in the safe deposit box.Īll worked up images are also stored on PhotoShelter. Past years are stored on two WD My passport Drives. Every month or so (depending on workload) the backup is backed up to a WD My passport Drive and that copy is moved offsite to a safe deposit box. That drive is backed up daily using Time Machine. The daily work for the year is stored on an external 5TB drive. UPDATE: As for my current 2018 setup, I am running an iMAC with a Retina 5K Display and a 3.5GHz Processor with 1TB Storage. Yes it can be used as a backup destination, but the redundancy is not a backup in itself. So in that vein, I am retitling the post. THIS IS NOT A BACKUP SYSTEM.This was the point I was trying to make. What I am trying to say is that many people use a RAID as their primary storage system, and have it configured either as a RAID 1 or 5, thinking that the redundancy of the RAID is a backup. It is possible I did not make clear what I was trying to convey about RAID.ĪNOTHER NOTE: I have redesigned the site and for some reason, the comments are not showing. NOTE: Over the past few years, I have received a lot of messages and comments about this post.

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