Re: Backup: optical disk, and RAID

[Johannes Wiedersich <johannes@physik.blm.tu-muenchen.de>]

Masatran, R. Deepak wrote:
> I need to backup a partition on my hard drive. Currently, I am trying to get
> CDRW-Taper to work. Is that the best, or does anyone recommend anything
> else?

There is no 'best' for all cases. It depends on your needs. For a single
computer mainly used by one person at at time I use and recommend backup
to external usb-drives (depending on the size a usb stick may work as
well):

1. They are much faster than burning a CD. You want to backup often, so
this will be an important consideration, especially if there is a lot of
data to be backed up.

2. Since you will want to backup often, they are usually cheaper, since
they can be written many times.

> Also, how does software RAID level-1, with a partition on another hard
> drive, compare with backup onto optical disk? I carry my hard drive around,
> and will not be carrying the backup hard drive.

A Raid is *not* a backup. A raid is a mechanism to avoid data loss in
case one disk fails. It cannot prevent data loss for any other mishap
that may happen to your computer.

HTH,
Johannes