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Raid5 or Timemachine?
- Thread starter zoran
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Because a RAID 5 system is for data preservation and integrity and TimeMachine is archival. In other words, if you have accidentally overwritten a document with a wrong version and want to revert to a previous version, RAID 5 won’t help you. If one of the drives in the RAID set crashes, you still have your document; the overwritten one, that is.
Also, keep in mind that time machine is based on hourly snapshots where raid5 is live.
They both do very different things and they both have big use. Time machine is not a replacement for raid systems.
They both do very different things and they both have big use. Time machine is not a replacement for raid systems.
Raids are a collection of drives making up a single piece of storage (ranging from Raid level 0 through to 5 usualy).
If a drive fails, then you will have a redundency kick in to ensure you can carry on (then simply remove the damaged drive & replace). The Raid will mirror data over the set with the redudent drive providing the backup to failures.
The quickest (& most risky) set up is level 0, as all drives rely on each other, so if one fails then they all will (resulting in data loss).
I suggest you look up in google the difference in the setups before you decide which flavour suits, as it will most depend on wether you need speed v's security.
If a drive fails, then you will have a redundency kick in to ensure you can carry on (then simply remove the damaged drive & replace). The Raid will mirror data over the set with the redudent drive providing the backup to failures.
The quickest (& most risky) set up is level 0, as all drives rely on each other, so if one fails then they all will (resulting in data loss).
I suggest you look up in google the difference in the setups before you decide which flavour suits, as it will most depend on wether you need speed v's security.
If the non RAID drive you are going to use for TimeMachine crashes, then still all is lost...... They are two comletely different mechanisms.
Point well made and point taken. So what would be the ultimate secure environment? Suppose i own a either a MacPro, or a MBPro. Just one of those two in each case. How should they be set up so i don't ever loose anything?
If you want the ultimate setup ... you would do raid 5 or 6 on the system it self (Dunno if the Mac Pro supports raid 6). Then, have a raid 5 or 6 setup for timemachine
Of course, that is very overboard and expensive. Doing raid5 on the system with a timemachine backup is fine. Don't need to raid5 the timemachine setup, its way overboard.
Keep in mind, raid 5 does give you a performance hit.
I could elaborate on how we did it for our own IT environment but that is of a completely different level. This is how I did it. I use a back-up program and an external drive that matches the size of my data partition. I’m still on a PC, but not for long. It is an excellent freeware tool that is scheduled to do a full differential back-up every evening and if the PC were switched-off, it will still do the back-up as soon as PC gets switched-on again. For really important data, like my documents, projects and photographs I make regular copies on DVD. The chances that AND the internal drives AND the back-up drive fail at the same moment in time are remote. If that happens, I still have the DVDs. It only lacks one more safeguard: back-ups should always be kept in different location from the original files. I think in your case a mirrored external drive (RAID 1) and DVD back-up should suffice. You could store the DVDs elsewhere. But I don’t know the volume of you data of course.
Use rsync to backup to a remote location.
Have a RAID array (RAID 5/6 or 50/60) for high performance storage with a degree of fault tolerance.
Use Time Machine to keep an archive of what has been on the RAID array over time.