I guess another option would be a RAID setup but I know very little about this, physically what I would need to get it set up, what happens in this case if one of the drives does go bad, how to implement it, etc... Can anyone shed some light on this or offer any good links/informational sites?
I think it's worth looking into if you don't mind playing around with your computer.
For the most part, RAID 1 [mirroring] is the cheapest and easiest way to manage this (although maybe not the easiest to set up initially). Once a pair of hard drives have been set up to use this you don't need to hit a button or do anything manual at all - files copied to the volume will automatically go to both hard drives immediately. I know of 2 ways to handle this:
- hardware RAID - your motherboard and system BIOS are used to set up the volume. When you turn on your computer, the OS will only see 1 hard drive. Not all computers have the capability to do this, check your documentation for RAID support on your motherboard.
- software RAID - you use software to manage the RAID volume, your OS sees 2 hard drives, the software manages them as a mirrored volume.
I would recommend hardware RAID over software if you can swing it, as it's reputed to be much more reliable. If you go software RAID and something happens to your OS requiring a reformat, you probably lose the volume (which IMO defeats the purpose of using RAID in the first place...).
Another option is using RAID 5 - this is ideal if you have 3 or more hard drives at your disposal to set up your system. You only lose the space of 1 hard drive for backup so you get more bang for your buck here. For example, let's say you have 4x 100GB hard drives - when using this for RAID 5, you would have a single 300GB volume with the ability for a single failure point. In other words, 1 hard drive can fail and your data remains intact and available to you. If a 2nd drive fails, you lose all of your data on all 4 drives - so it's best to replace the failed drive immediately. It should be noted that all of the drives used for a RAID 5 configuration must be the same size and speed. Oh, and as a side benefit, RAID 5 has a higher read rate than RAID 1.
If you need more info, try this:
RAID 1:
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_01.htmlRAID 5:
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_05.html