“We usually store our photos, documents, and more on a single hard disk — or, increasingly these days, a solid state drive (SSD) — but there’s always the nagging worry that the disk will fail, taking all your work and memories with it,” Christopher Phin writes for Macworld. “Backing up using Time Machine, Super Duper!, or CrashPlan, say, is a good way of reducing this risk, but there is another: RAID.”
“RAID can be incredibly complicated, but it’s extremely worthwhile — one of the things it can do is to mirror the contents of one disk completely to another, all the time,” Phin writes. “While cloning your hard disk using Super Duper!, for example, is something that might happen once a day, with a RAID system, every bit of data that’s written to one disk is simultaneously written to the second, so that if one drive fails, you have a perfect copy of everything it contained on the second. (And optionally, if you replace the failed drive, everything will be mirrored back across to it automatically.)”
“The especially good news is that a mirrored RAID setup like this, once it’s configured, appears to you and to your computer as a single disk, so it’s as easy to use as a single disk—defining it as a backup target, say, or simply dropping files onto it like with any other disk—but just safer,” Phin writes. “You could use a mirrored RAID system like this to store important archives or current work projects, or you could give yourself extra protection against lost data by using a mirrored RAID drive as the one you back up to using, for example, Time Machine. That way, you’re backing up, but your backup itself is doubly protected against failure. This is what we’ll be doing here, but you can use a mirrored RAID disk for anything you like that requires a bit more data security.”
Step-bystep instructions in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Better safe than sorry!