So you’ve implemented a RAID drive on your home computer and now feel comfortable knowing that your photographs will not be forever lost if some sort of failure happens on that computer… Well don’t feel too comfortable says my friend Bill. What if you have a fire in your home? What if a burglar steals the computer? What if flooding submerges your PC? And (lately) what if a hurricane blows everything away? Yes, he’s good at coming up with disaster scenarios and he’s right! Though some of these scenarios are more realistic than others all of them would nevertheless threaten those precious photographs (or video, or music or emails, etc…) stored on your PC. So what can you do? Well now that you’ve introduced a RAID drive in your system, the solution is quite simple and really only a small extension to the modifications you’ve already implemented. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that you will need to purchase yet another hard drive (again identical to the two already in your RAID setup) and something called a mobile rack with a removable hard drive tray. You will also need a second removable tray compatible with that rack. I said bad news but storage is relatively inexpensive today and the tray can be purchased for really not much (especially online in place like ebay…) and anyhow those pictures are really priceless (aren’t they?)

The idea behind this additional equipment is to very easily and regularly create an exact replica of your hard drive and to store this replica away from your PC preferably in another place (i.e. your mom’s, brother’s or friend’s house…) This replica will have on it everything that’s on your PC so you don’t have to decide which files you backup and which ones you don’t.

So here is how I went about setting up this easy to manage backup solution using my RAID controller.

1- Started by installing the rack and tray in my PC so that now one of the two RAID member drives is easily removable.

Hard Drive in Rack

2- I made sure I knew which drive is which on the RAID controller software interface. In my case I have a PC that can support four SATA drives (0,1,2 &3) so I made sure that the drive that cannot be swapped (easily…) is connected to port 0 and that the rack/tray mounted drive is connected to port 2 (you’ll see why later…). I also installed the third drive I purchased into the additional tray.

Hard Drive in Tray

3- Once this was done I booted up the system and made sure that everything was working properly (i.e. the RAID drive was in a good mirroring state and full redundancy was available).

Now when I’m ready to make a backup I follow this procedure:

4- Shut-down computer
5- De-power the rack (their should be a power button on the rack).

Power Button On Rack

 
6- Remove the hard drive in the rack. Put this drive aside as it is now your new backup drive (in other words it’s an exact copy of the other drive still in your PC and it therefore has a copy of all your pictures.)
7- Re-start the computer.
8- Once PC is fully restarted, you should get a message telling you that one of the RAID member drives is missing and that data redundancy is lost.
9- Insert the third drive (not the backup one you just pulled out!) in the rack and power on the rack. Your PC and RAID controller will automatically find the new drive.
10- Using the RAID controller software reset the new drive to non-RAID. MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE NEW DRIVE BEFORE DOING THIS (This is where connecting the non-swappable disk to the port 0 comes in handy…) In my case I reset the drive on port 2 to non-RAID by right clicking it in the RAID controller software interface.
11- I then tell the RAID controller to rebuild to the new drive by again right clicking it in the RAID controller software interface.
12- The RAID controller will now rebuild the RAID drive and in a few hours (the time depends on drive size, processor speed as well as other factors…) you will again have a new set of mirrored redundant RAID drives.

Here is a short video demonstrating steps 8 to 12 on my RAID software (in my case it’s the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.)

So voilà! You now have a complete backup of your system (the drive you pulled out in step #6) that should now be store away from your PC. (I store mine at a friend’s house several streets away from my place…)

Every week or so I recuperate the drive stored at my friends house (she’s a good friend…) and repeat step 4 to 12. It’s so easy to do and causes almost no interruption in my daily workflow. So now should anything go wrong with my PC and (god forbid!) it is destroyed, lost (?) or stolen, I still have a full backup including all those precious photographs (and video, and music and emails, etc…) Thanks for the idea Bill!

In an upcoming post I’ll discuss how again a RAID drive can help you quickly get your PC up and running again in the event of a boot up error that sometime happens after trying to update the operating system software.