Get Serious About Backing Up, Part 1, the RAID

Everything in our world is going digital, and that means that the information we store on our computers and hard drives is getting larger all the time, and doubly as vital to our future. This article is the first in a series peering into how profession tactics to create large reliable storage can be migrated into the typical consumer home. The first step in this journey is to look at RAID storage solutions and what they are.

When it comes to long term storage and access of any data, most people don’t understand how vulnerable they are. When is comes to housing data and backing it up, the key word is redundancy. Most people consider a single drive attached to their computer externally a “back up” drive. This is great for drives that use incremental back up programs like Apple’s Time Machine, or a whole host of consumer programs, most of which now come standard with an external drive. The inherent problem in all this is that most users don’t just keep copies at this point, but instead use the external drive as a place to house their only copy of large media, be it pictures, papers or music. The minute the data only exists in one place, you have opened yourself to potential data loss. All it takes is a drop of the drive, or just plain failure to lose months or years worth of work. You could burn the information onto DVDs and lock them away, but what about groups of data larger than your disk can handle, and what if you need to make a small change to the data, well then you’ve got to burn it all over again. No, its hard to get away from hard drives when you’ve talking about data anymore, let’s face it.

So if you’re stuck with hard drives and your external drive is already sounding funny, what do you do then? One popular answer amongst network managers and geeks alike is use of RAID technologies. RAID is an acronym coined in Berkley that means a “redundant array of inexpensive disks”. The core concept of RAID in general is to spread copies of the same data across a number of drives attached to the same computer in order to create redundancy in your system so that you can suffer the loss of a hard drive and not lose a drop of data. There are many flavors of how you can sort that data that provide benefits in safety or performance, but we’re not going to get into that level of detail today. RAIDs are also great because you get the added benefit of letting that group of hard drives appear to your computer as one single continuous volume of storage. Technologies like this are how Google and other major web hosting companies manage all the information stored on their servers for fast and regular access.

Sure, that’s great, but do I need 20 terabytes of storage? Chances are you don’t, but savvy companies have realized that consumers need that kind of security just as much as big companies do, just on a smaller scale. There have been blossoming offerings from major consumer suppliers to get you this product, some of them already built with hard drives that you can take home from the store and be happily ticking away. Vendors like Netgear and Data Robotics are making a fortune off this, and we want to help you make an educated decision in the future to help prevent that day when you realize just how much you’ve lost. We would like to help you make your next storage decision a wise and sustainable one. Our next installment in this series will feature a comparison of popular products known as DAS, or directly attached storage, stay tuned.