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The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => D-Link Storage => DNS-325 => Topic started by: hdd_oedipus on May 27, 2012, 04:13:01 PM

Title: Incremental backup instead of RAID 1?
Post by: hdd_oedipus on May 27, 2012, 04:13:01 PM
I'm thinking about using incremental backup instead of RAID 1 on a DNS-325, for the following reasons.  Curious if people with more experience have any comments:

1.  Easier to swap hard drives in case of failure or upgrade.  It will just be possible to pull out the hard drive to be replaced, slip in a new one, and not worry at ALL about losing data on the remaining drive.

2.  Less wear on the backup disk.  My impression is some file transfers cause more wear than others.  Transfers that take a long time, with pieces added over a period of hours, take longer than transfers done using a utility like rsync.  So these transfers cause more damage to the disk.

3.  Safe to use drives of different capacities and by different manufacturers.

The only obvious disadvantage I can see is that you have no redundancy between incremental backups, but I think the risk of incremental data loss for me is not serious.  Any comments/thoughts?
Title: Re: Incremental backup instead of RAID 1?
Post by: JavaLawyer on May 27, 2012, 05:13:40 PM
Please see the following post: DNS-325 - Data Backup Versus Redundancy (http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=46508.0)
Title: Re: Incremental backup instead of RAID 1?
Post by: hdd_oedipus on May 27, 2012, 05:21:40 PM
Thanks, I actually read that post before posting this thread.  I think the conclusion in my OP is warranted (that, for me, incremental backup is better than RAID 1), but I thought I'd check to see if I'm overlooking anything.
Title: Re: Incremental backup instead of RAID 1?
Post by: JavaLawyer on May 28, 2012, 08:30:15 AM
RAID-1 is not a backup. If the only copy of your data resides on your DNS-325, then a scheduled backup from Volume_1 to Volume_2 is better suited than a RAID-1 array.