Backup strategy - lots of questions!

[indy2005]

Hi,

Having paid $60 this month on transferring video files to Amazon s3...I have decided having a robust strategy using external hdd.

I want to keep a 2tb drive off site and bring it back in occasionally , for video and pics mainly. I was going to set up a 3 way raid-1 mirror setup, get all 3 drives synched and then take one off the drives off site. once a month I would hope to bring that drive back and have raid kick in to synch it when I re-attach it. First would this work!?

I was then going to get a time machine dedicated non-raid hdd. I was hoping to use this to back up the OS and some Xcode stuff in Documents. But...I am also hoping to move my libraries for iPhoto onto the raid system...but have time machine backup the photo library if possible off the external drive. Can I do this, as my system hdd us not very large.

I would probably want to change the default locations of iMovie etc also to the raid drive if possible. Again is this possible for all these base apps (Inc iTunes)...?

Any advice appreciated...

Regards

I

 

[basher]

Hi,
I want to keep a 2tb drive off site and bring it back in occasionally , for video and pics mainly. I was going to set up a 3 way raid-1 mirror setup, get all 3 drives synched and then take one off the drives off site. once a month I would hope to bring that drive back and have raid kick in to synch it when I re-attach it. First would this work!?

It would work.

Any drive you add or remove from the mirror will require that the mirror be rebuilt. Given the size it might take several hours to rebuild. Are these going to be FireWire drives(I hope).

 

[indy2005]

Hi,

They are USB butvi am not concerned about the time... Seeing as it took 2 weeks of constant uploading to backup to s3. I only have less than 300gb at the moment of data. So would the raid part work? How would I do it, shut down mac, disconnect drive 3 from raid...and then reattach a month later, and wait while they all synch? I guess the mac would realise it was part of the original raid set up, and it would rebuild automatically...with no data loss?

How would I know they are back in synch?

Also, am I right that the 3 disk raid needs to be set up up front, rather than having a 2 drive set up and adding a new disk 3 months down the line...?

Regards

I