It’s not necessary. Just have a backup. If it’s something you can’t afford to lose.
Comment on Looking to build my first PC in almost 30 years; What should I be on the look out for?
CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 4 months agoI’ve gone back and forth on whether I need RAID locally. Giving up at least a third of your storage capacity (assuming RAID 5) for the off-chance that your hard drive dies in 3-4 years seems like a high price to pay. I had two drives fail in the lifespan of my current desktop. And I had enough warning from SMART that I could peel off the data before the drives bricked. I know I got lucky, but still…
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 months ago
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Just go with Raid-1 then
felbane@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If you’re practicing 3-2-1 backups then you probably don’t need to bother with RAID.
I can hear the mechanical keyboards clacking; Hear me out: If you’re not committed to a regular backup strategy, RAID can be a good way to protect yourself against a sudden hard drive failure, at which point you can do an “oh shit” backup and reconsider your life choices. RAID does nothing else beyond that. If your data gets corrupted, the wrong bits will happily be synced to the mirror drives. If you get ransomwared, congratulations you now have two copies of your inaccessible encrypted data.
Skip the RAID and set up backups. It can be as simple as an external drive that you plug in once a week and run rsync, or you can pay for a service like backblaze that has a client to handle things, or you can set up a NAS that receives a nightly backup from your PC and then pushes a copy up to something like B2 or S3 glacier.
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
The only thing I’ll add is that RAID is redundancy. Its purpose is to prevent downtime, not data loss.
If you aren’t concerned with downtime, RAID is the wrong solution.
jjlinux@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
I have nothing to add here. Your assessment is spot on.
CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I know that this is the self-hosted community but I very much agree. The way I run my desktop is that I can, in most cases, lose my primary hard drive and I’ll survive. It won’t be pretty and I might have a few local repos that I haven’t synced in a while but overall, it ain’t bad.
Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t want my primary hard drive restored if I can do it. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to restore them from the drive. But if I can’t, the most I lose is some config files, which I should start to version control but I get lazy.
I can’t back up my media. It’s just too big. But yar.
My greatest fear is losing my porn collection. 😅 But not enough to RAID.