What do you think of alternative back up systems, such as a tape
backup with bare metal restore software? I'd go that route instead if I could fine a solution which would allow me to restore to different hardware, i.e. if my motherboard dies and I need to buy a different brand or model MB. I know Storix back up software has this capability - I use storix on my Linux server with RAID 1. @ home I have one Linux and one Windows desktop machine.
raid is no substitute for backup, raid is strictly for maintaining 24/7 uptime in the face of hardware failures, which is total overkill for your desktop.
Skip RAID entirely.... Instead, get some external USB drives. on the linux machine, use 'dump' or 'tar' or whatever in a script to make backups, on the windows machine, get and use Acronis DiskImage, which has a bare metal restore from a bootable CD-R you can build.
build the windows system so the c: 'system' drive is only about 30-40GB, plenty big enough for the OS plus all your mainstream applications (adobe, etc), and use a D: drive for /all/ your data, including your user account profile. this way the bare metal restore only has to restore said C:, and you can use incremental datafile oriented backup techniques for the D: 'data' drive.
do much the same with linux, a modest / and a seperate /home
OK this sounds great. My only questions here are, with Acronis DiskImage and or other vendors, if my motherboard/graphic card combo fails, could I migrate to a different model motherboard/graphic card combo? Also can one Acronis DiskImage package (or other vendors) do bare metal restore on both Linux boxes and Windows boxes, so I could use the same bare metal restore package on both machines? _________________________________________________________________ Helping your favorite cause is as easy as instant messaging. You IM, we give. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Home/?source=text_hotmail_join