After a headline like that, you would expect to read a horror story about how the person lost all kinds of valuable data and spend long hours trying to recreate their system, programs, settings and data they had.

This story is different…

It woke me up in the middle of the night. There was a strange beeping noise coming from my office. I ignored it at first, but it kept beeping and woke me up again so I went in to investigate.

It took me a while to find the source of the beeping. What I saw would chill most computer users to the bone.

It was my hard disk beeping a death knell. There was a blue screen of death on my monitor. Red lights were blinking.

My wife also woke up and came in to see what was beeping. “My hard disk just failed” I told her.

“Oh No! What will happen?” she replied.

“No big deal. My RAID system has a duplicate disk with the exact same content. I’ll just throw out the dead disk. Just takes a minute.”

“Oh. I’m going back to bed,” she said.

How come I wasn’t worried when the hard drive that runs my entire business failed?

In a word, RAID.

The photo above shows my system.

It stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Mine is a piece of hardware (and firmware) mounted in my tower in which two identical hard disk drives sit.

What RAID does is simple. It takes everything on one disk and makes an exact duplicate on the other. So both of my disk drives always have the exact same content.

That means the same data, the same programs and the same configurations.

Anyone who has bought a new computer, or replaced a hard drive knows how much work it can be to get all your programs, settings, passwords and data moved onto a new drive. It can take days. And that’s if all your data is perfectly backed up.

You and I know that almost nobody’s data is ever perfectly backed up. Ask yourself about your own backup. What happens when your drive fails?

But with my RAID, it was not even an issue. One disk failed, but the other simply took over. I didn’t even notice the difference and I didn’t lose one byte of data.

Sure, I will have to go out and spend $100 or so on another disk drive to replace the failed one. But I won’t have to spend a minute worrying about my data.

And more importantly, I won’t lose one minute of business productivity.

With my RAID system, I actually have three identical drives. They can be “hot swapped” which means I can simply unplug one and plug in a new one, which is what I did. Even when the computer is running. As soon as a new drive is plugged in, the built-in software updates everything from the master onto that new disk so they both end up with identical data.

So what I normally do every few days is swap the disk from my shelf into my PC, and put the other on my shelf.

That way, even if a horrible virus or software issue totally killed my system, I can just unplug the two drives which are carrying that virus, and plug in the other one.

In this worst case scenario, I only lose a day or two of data, when most people in that scenario would lose ALL their programs and settings, as well as some data.

Here’s a link to the system I have.

http://tonyh.stores.yahoo.net/acacideinrak.html

It costs around $300, including the two 160GB drives.
(I’d buy another identical drive so you can have easier back-up as I described above.)

Or for a few bucks more (you also need more room in your PC drive bay) you can get a three-disk system so you can always leave all the disks plugged in and get redundant backup.

http://tonyh.stores.yahoo.net/acacs76svera.html