Kasper Sandberg wrote:

On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 00:06 -0700, David Rees wrote:
  

quoted

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Kasper Sandberg [off-list ref] wrote:
    

quoted

 in other words, would i be
 safer to run rsync every day to my other disk, and run in non-raid
 mode?!
      

What would be safer is to run rsync every day from one redundant array
to another array - preferably on another machine that is located as
far away as possible from the one that you are backing up.

RAID is not the same as a backup, though unfortunately, too many
people treat it as such.
    

Im not treating it as a backup, what i want, is to make sure that if 1
disk dies, the data is still intact and ill hopefully be able to run
with 1 disk till the newly ordered one arrives - and while i naturally
will keep offsite backups of most important data, it is certainly far
easier to simply rip out a faulty disk, and put in another, instead of
restoring from backup from scratch..

So my question remains.. Is md raid1 not suited for this need? would it
be safer to run in non-raid1 mode and daily(maybe hourly) rsync
everything over to the second disk?
  

Raid protects against disk failure. So your use  is fine.

Backup also protects against user error and virus/worm/cracker damage.
If you accidentally overwrite a file, or a virus/worm/cracker messes up 
the filesystem,
then RAID loose because the overwiting/messing happens on both disks.
In that case you'll still be able to get stuff from a backup.


Helge Hafting