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Real-life example of RAID is not a backup

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stevech

Part of the Furniture
My always-on home automation, web server, HD TV recording PC in the garage has run for 5 or so years 24/7. Has RAID1 motherboard, two 500GB disks (WD). And other disks. A C: partition in the RAID, and another for data and videos. No one ever uses this PC from the keyboard. No risky web surfing done. It's a server purpose, but runs XP Pro.

Periodic backups saved my fanny again - the WAF would fail without its functions.

After all this time, one morning Win XP Pro starts throwing illogical error messages like Explorer has stopped working, Windows terminated a VB Command Line action, and several others. No evidence of access/hacking by my LAN monitoring tools. Win XP Restore Points going back months, AS USUAL, refused to revert. Chkdisk found nothing. Win XP repair refused to do so.

My habit of doing both disk imaging and partition backups, using Acronis Tru Image paid off again. I did an image of the honked up partition, then rolled in a backup using Acronis' bootable recovery CD. Now we have again a stable system. Just 4 or so files to get and copy over, (by mounting the most backup as a drive letter) then we're good to go again.

Cannot say why files got corrupted. The RAID1 is just 50GB for the boot disk and windows. All my data is on a different RAID partition which seems unaffected.

RAID Is Not A Backup.
 
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Normal for XP to behave this way. Regular cleanings of the registry, MFT and pagefile system will help to a degree. True Image is a very good image program. when it comes to recovery like what happen to you.
 
RAID is never a substitute for a backup strategy - RAID can provide real-time fallbacks in the event of a disk failure depending on configuration...

I manage several RAID 5+0 arrays for High Performance/High Availability storage - I still do regular backups (not of the file system, but the database dump).
 
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RAID is never a substitute for a backup strategy - RAID can provide real-time fallbacks in the event of a disk failure depending on configuration...

I manage several RAID 5+0 arrays for High Performance/High Availability storage - I still do regular backups (not of the file system, but the database dump).

Q-TAPE BACKUP most server room had several of these to backup systems info that was critical daily. I always got stuck doing this.
 

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