Possible to break a RAID system into two separate drives?

[luigidorf]

I'm looking at backup options for my MBP, and I was thinking it would be good to have a copy of my drive (made by CCC) as well as a Time Machine backup. For this I'd need two hard drives, 500GB each. If I got a pre-configured RAID system such as the G-RAID mini, would it be possible to use its two drives separately? Would it make sense?

If it is possible, how would I go about doing it? I could partition the RAID 0 configuration into two drives, but that doesn't seem clean or correct.

 

[GGJstudios]

What do you hope to gain by using TM, since you're already using CCC?

 

[tekkietekkie]

I dont know the system your talking about but i am assuming i has 2x500gb drives, if thats the case then yeah you should be able to use raid 0 and then create 2 partitions

What is the advantage of using both ccc and tm? Ccc will only have the latest (if its just a copy) if you need to restore a file from 3 backups ago because it was deleted or corrupt then u can get it from tm

 

[flynz4]

I dont know the system your talking about but i am assuming i has 2x500gb drives, if thats the case then yeah you should be able to use raid 0 and then create 2 partitions

What is the advantage of using both ccc and tm? Ccc will only have the latest (if its just a copy) if you need to restore a file from 3 backups ago because it was deleted or corrupt then u can get it from tm

I believe that CCC also supports versioning. I have never used that feature, but I think it is there. I have only used the cloning feature... and only when I was making duplicate disk images from HDDs to SSDs. However, in my experience, CCC is a great program and I strongly encourage making a donation if you use it.

I do think that the user interface of TM is really quite good... which is one of the reasons that I use it for my local backups.

Irrespective of which you choose... I am continuously amazed at home many people log on here (almost daily) with lost data due to a crashed HDD and have never backed up their machines. TM is built into the platform... there are other options such as CCC... and not to mention great inexpensive cloud backup solutions. I simply do not understand human behavior of people who do not back up their computers.

/Jim

 

[luigidorf]

I dont know the system your talking about but i am assuming i has 2x500gb drives, if thats the case then yeah you should be able to use raid 0 and then create 2 partitions

Regardless of the capabilities of CCC, I might just opt for one CCC drive for the sake of simplicity.

But for the sake of argument, it seems to me that dividing a RAID 0 system into two partitions wouldn't actually separate the two drives. In RAID 0, if one drive fails, the entire system fails. My intuition say that if you partitioned the RAID 0 system into two drives, data on one partition would still be stored on both physical drives, so losing one drive would result in the loss of both partitions.

 

[skorpien]

So then change it from RAID 0 to RAID 1. That's the only way to make a two disk RAID setup redundant, no? You'll be losing half of the storage space (500 GB vs the full 1 TB), but if one disk fails you have the ability to recover from that. Then you'd be further partitioning that setup into two partitions if you want to keep them separate.

 

[LeandrodaFL]

It makes no sense either way. If you partition a RAID 1 or RAID 0, whenver a drive fails, both backups will be affected. The point is that you want to have 2 backups in case both a drive and a backp fails, right?

So, I happen to have soemthing similar, I have both a USB and a Firewiere drive, and I backup to both. I use continuous ALL THE TIME ACTIVE backup on the USB. The software I use is Memeo. For the Firewire drive, I have Time Machine to wich I make a snapshot of the entire system every day. Also, I do like having the TM versions capability.

Another option is for cloud backup