Is RAID 1 what I want to use for my purpose?

[tracerit]

I work from home and want to protect myself against a failed drive. If my drive goes out, then I'm going to miss out on quite a bit of income.

Is RAID 1 what I want then? Have two drives mirroring each other and if one drive fails, I'll just do what I assume will be to turn the computer off, unplug the failed drive and then boot back up on the second drive and continue my work? Or is it more involved than that?

 

[Billb2]

Pretty much that's the way it works, but if you buy 3 (or 4) identical drives then, when a drive fails, you just plug in the new (identical) one and the array (duplicate) will automatically be rebuilt and you'll be back to where you started with two mirrored drives. I suggest buying extra drives because arrays work the best with identical drives (mixed drives will function at the size of the smallest and the speed of the slowest) so that if your current drives are obsoleted you'll have identical spares ready to go and won't have to be searching for something that matches.

If you livelihood depends on the data on the drives you might want to consider off site backups too.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

If an hour's time is critical to vast sums of revenue from your business activity, then RAID1 is probably a good idea.

There is also the option to use drive-pooling software with two or more disks, so that the only duplication takes place at the file and folder level to distribute the duplicates across multiple drives, as opposed to simply replicating an entire disk.

If you can make up the hour's loss for a hard disk failure in the same day, then daily incremental backup is probably as much as you need. It might take an hour or two to do a bare-metal restore for a hard disk. But if you implemented RAID1, it would still be the most prudent thing to have daily backup as well.