Recommend 2 Bay enclosure with RAID

Fair enough.

It would be like having 2 copies of the 500GB disk. So your total backup space will be 500GB.

Now the mybook externals are going to be a problem I believe.

I've had a friend with 1 where the enclosure died, and unfortunately is unable to mount the drive he pulled out because it has some hardware based firmware that is attached to the physical drive with screws in the enclosure, and it also has support for encryption, making it impossible to swap it to another bay.

Not sure if your model has this or not, but I would recommend getting a very reilaible drive. I use WD Caviar Black 2TB which is supposed to be enterprise reliability, but you pay double (worth it). I follow Pondini's excellent backup proceedures and use Time Machine on one drive, and Super Dooper / CCC to make a bootable image on the other drive.

Which would be more efficient than using a 2 bay RAID enclosure IMO.

Yeah it probably is possible with disk utility, but I'm not sure exactly what the best method is. I'll leave that for someone more experienced here. But from what I know, it's not a very good way to do it. It is far better to have a built in raid controller on the enclosure, so it does the work and not your mac.

His was a 1TB MyBook Studio Silver I believe. So yeah, anyone who is able to save their data is always lucky! 😀

I was able to mount the drive, however it showed no data, and even Data Rescue 3 came up with no files except some manufacturers tools.

Don't forget, that you will have to do delete 500GB for this to work if both are full.

When I need to go out and buy a RAID system, I'll only get a 4+ bay enclosure, and almost certainly the Drobo S, so I can afford to have 2 drives fail at exactly the same time. Only be using WD Caviar Black (for hopefully enterprise reliability).

Like I said. A 2 bay enclosure is a waste of time, because you can make a clone of the backup HDD if you wish, any time you want.

But it's silly, what happens when your HDD corrupts itself over a day or 2?

You have 3 copies of that corrupted drive? How is that going to help you?

See where I'm coming from?

Ok, let's say you currently have a 500GB internal drive in your MBP.

You have 2 x 500GB external drives in a RAID enclosure mirrored.

So that's only just enough to make 1 single image of your internal HDD on drive 1 / that again on drive 2. So the external drives are exactly the same.

Obviously the RAID sorted that mirror / duplication for you.

So that's a TOTAL of 3 drives - all exactly the same.

Ok.

So you are repeating this process every day or two.

Let's say you just imaged up, and then you realise that your internal drive has some data corruption, and that's been eating away for a few days. So you want to restore a backup.

Problem is, you have 2 seperate backup copies of your corrupted internal drive. Obviously both images are identical, so the corruption is also on them.

So, all that backup really wasn't that efficient after all? 😉

Make sense?

I wasn't aware Super Duper held historical backups.

I'll have to look into that.

EDIT: yes you mean incremental. But it's still an exact copy of your current drive.

You should talk to Pondini.

He is the master of backup solutions.

I'd link you to his site, but that might be rude of me.

Might just wait for him to pop his head in.

Well the benefit would be that you can run RAID 5.

Ok, I'm starting this reply again. It's actaully harder to explain than I thought.

I just watched a bunch of youtube video's & I think this one explains it best!

Part 1 - Harware vs. Software RAID

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNIfTV9jy40

Part 2 - Standard RAID

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_rchCjcYu8

Part 3 - Nested RAID

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCD52OJwoT4

Hope that helps. If you have any more questions after you've watched them fire away.

🙂