[NLRS] WA2VOI DISASTER

[Ford Peterson]

One approach that is real easy to accomplish these days is to use an
external drive connected to USB.  ...snip...  take it to work or some other
off-site safe place.

Chris Elmquist NØJCF

[FP>] That's the approach I use.  An external drive does the data backup.  I
store that backup drive in a separate building.  In a tornado, or fire,
theory has it I'd but current minus a day or two.  In a thermo-nuclear
disaster, well, who cares?  The data recovery is very simple as well.  If
you need to restore an individual file, just plug it into the USB port and
it's all there for the copy procedure.

The beauty of being able to recover from the RAID is that everything works
like normal.  Restoring data does not restore the applications.  Windows
apps get pretty cranky when they appear to be running on a different drive
or CPU.  There is little benefit from backing up all those apps.  So you end
up rebuilding the computer, which can take an exceptional amount of time.
Particularly when you consider all the 100MB+ downloads needed to update
everything.  The last time I rebuilt a computer the downloaded updates were
well over several GB.  Even through a DSL line, that doesn't just happen in
a few minutes.  It's a major pain in the butt.  Being able to restore a
computer from a RAID once provides enough benefit to pay for a dozen RAID
systems.

Ford-N0FP