RAID vs a large single Drive?

[spierce7]

I'm planning out my system, and what I read everywhere is that I shouldn't rely on RAID as a backup solution, but instead should use an external system to backup my data.

Does that mean it's reasonable for instead of using a raid, to buy 2X 6TB drives? One to store all my data, and the other to place in an enclosure and push back-ups to it nightly? Or should I still tend towards using a raid?

 

[Spearfoot]

You most definitely should use RAID (mirrors, RAIDZ2, etc.) if you're planning on using FreeNAS - that's what FreeNAS is all about! The point is that you need a backup in addition to your FreeNAS server, not as a replacement for it.

 

[depasseg]

It's up to you. When people say "RAID isn't backup", they are comparing the ability of storage to survive one or many drive failure(s) (RAID) with the ability to go back in time (file deletion, accidental overwrite, virus encrypting everything, etc), (backup). Your use case could be perfectly happy with a single disk, that when it fails, you copy from your backup disk and then keep living your life. Others prefer to have RAID in place so that the data is still available after a disk failure, and the recover happens in the background with the click of a button.

You will still get file level corruption detection with a single drive, you just couldn't correct it.

Also, for most people, the amount of data to store exceeds the capacity of a single drive.

 

[spierce7]

Right, good points. I'll stick with a raid.