My Experience (for what it's worth)

by Gene
(Chadds Ford, PA USA)

Dave - thanks again for your response a few nights ago, very helpful! I've read your advice and suggestions with interest, and wanted you to know of my experience - and I may make a case for online backup. My current computer has three 500-GB hard drives, and I had the first two originally configured in a RAID 0 Stripe, alternately reading/writing for the speed, as you suggest. And my experience agrees with yours, it is indeed faster. I used my third drive for backup, also had an external 500 GB for backup. My sad experience is that my ASUS P5QL-E motherboard failed, not sure why, but it was just out of warranty. Then within 24 hours, my external hard drive failed. It was under warranty but the data was gone anyway, of course. I replaced the motherboard with another P5QL-E, but could not get my built-in floppy drive, nor a couple of external ones I scrounged, to read the disk so I could again configure the drives in RAID 0. So this time I have them configured conventionally, and am living with it. But I don't trust that external hard drive, so I'm using it only for "insignificant" backups, like less important images and the like. After lots of research and a trial with the 2 GB free account, I now have the Dropbox online backup installed. I bought the 50 GB package ($9.99/mo)and it seems to be very adequate for my needs, and it is truly awesome. Incredibly fast and painless, it instantly backs up anything I put in that special folder upon the save. It's also a much easier way to share images with clients and friends, including high resolution ones. I just put the images in this special folder (or subfolder within that folder) on my local hard drive, then go get the link for it, and send that to friends. They can view the images individually or as a slideshow, and copying them is a simple right-click context menu thing. I won't do Raid 0 again though, and I won't depend solely on an external drive for backup again. The file-sharing side benefit of Dropbox is for me well worth that $10 monthly.

Reply

Great post. You note some important points, external drives for backup. You're not the only one that's had a drive like this fail. For whatever reason they don't seem to be as stable as something installed in the case. Redundancy for backup you bet. All my important information is in 3 spots. My main hard drive, my backup drive, and online. This really is the best way to make sure you have everything.

I use dropbox as well, and for those wanting an easy fast solution, this is it. As mentioned, it adds a folder on your desktop, simply copy just as you normally would to any other folder, the program does the rest. You can also use it on multiple PC's to synchronize data.