Originally posted by: Booshanky
Originally posted by: Matthias99
You don't *really* want to do this (and no, I don't think Windows itself can mirror to a removable device like a USB harddrive, but I may be wrong).
Your computer would run painfully slowly when writing data to that drive.
The computer would run slow, or it would just take a lot longer to copy data?
Possibly both. You'd have the extra CPU overhead of doing the RAID1 (which isn't huge, admittedly), plus the CPU overhead of running the USB interface (which, for high-speed USB2.0, can be significant depending on the controller). It will *definitely* take longer to copy your data.
The thing is, I don't really mess with the data that often on the drive. Occasionally I'll add another new album or a new divx rip, or I'll update ID3 tags or something, but for the most part it just sits there and supplies me with my music and movies.
Assuming mostly static data with no need for 100% uptime, regular backups are a better solution here than trying to use RAID.
Get some decent backup software that can do incremental backups and set it to run as often as you like?
Honestly, would daily backups be that different than RAID1? Unless both drives fail, you'd only lose one day's worth of data at most.
No, they really wouldnt be that different, the only thing is that the only backup software i've really used is dantz retrospect and i find their method of backing up to compressed files they call "Backup sets" to be pretty annoying for what I want to do (not to mention the myriad of licenses they rip you off with).
Most backup programs will do something like this; compressed archives save disk space. I believe there are some that can just keep various folders/files in sync, however, so that you can simply copy the data back without needing any special software if something goes wrong.
If there's some simple software that will just copy changes from one drive to another on a regular basis that would work for me.
There are some good packages out there, but unfortunately most of my experience in this area is in enterprise-class setups (so I don't really know what is out there right now in the consumer space). You definitely want something that can do 'incremental backup' for this type of data set.
What I dont want is software that will just copy new files from one drive to another, because then i'll likely get a ton of duplicate files (when i get higher quality rips and delete the old files, etc).
You should be able to choose with most programs whether you want to keep a permanent backup of files that have been deleted, or remove them with the next incremental backup (or keep them for a certain amount of time). Keeping them around for a while can be a good idea, in case you accidentally delete something you didn't mean to.
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