RAID is a saviour
Following a sudden disk crash a number of months I decided to review my whole configuration, storage and back-up strategy.
C:\ – 200gb boot drive running Windows 7 purely used for OS and installed applications
G:\ - installed a raid controller with simple configuration of raid 1 across 2 512gb SATA drives. This is my home directory holding all documents, development code, photos etc
I:\ – external 512gb SATA used for daily synch’s using SyncToy. This utilises a CNM HDD docking station accessed via eSATA allowing me to swap in additional disk drives.
L:\ – external 512gb NAS used for weekly backups
This configuration served me well this week as a sudden power cut appeared to have corrupted one of the 2 raided drives and Windows was declaring an imminent failure. The SATA controller detected this failure and proceeded to rebuild the corrupted disk.
I did lean one hard lesson from previous failure. I had built up a collection of resource material from surfing the web which I never used to back-up as I thought can always find it again. But never quite works that way!!! I now include all of these in my synching/back-ups.
Links:
Note: If planning on using SyncToy ensure you have closed applications that may lock files, e.g. Outlook. As these will not be synched and simply give you an empty file. I found this out the hard way!!!
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