Quote Originally Posted by Yoda View Post
The smallest HDDs these days would certainly seem overkill for this purpose, but you can always put the extra space to good use. For instance, you can implement rolling backups easily.

Like, if you back up daily, don't just keep the most recent backup, keep a week's worth, or even more. This has saved me at least a couple of times when the version of the file in the most recent backup wasn't the one I wanted.
I plan to have three back ups rolling through the week ... so it's not just one day.


And you should. Doesn't take a fire to render your server and its RAID useless. Faulty memory, viruses, etc. will trash your files and the only thing RAID will do is mirror that corruption to the other disks.

This is not an anti-RAID campaign though. Just pointing out that it's not a backup strategy and that it serves a different purpose.
I know, hence the current optical backup (1 per day of the week). But since the cost of technology has fallen for solid state media, I was thinking of something better already.

RAID is just my first line in keeping the server running and keeping downtime to a minimum. My years of working as a network tech support engineer did teach me a few things to implement in our own systems.