Test Idea To See If Backup Really Works

I have always wanted a Raptor SATA RAID 0 setup for the speed, but would only do so with good back-ups due to the increase failure chance. I researched many reviews and found TI to be the best backup program available. I built my new machine, nice Raptor RAID 0 (which I am very happy with... it's smokin'!!!) and have been merrily backing-up everything to both a partition to a third hard drive (IDE) and an external USB2.0 Firefly 20gig HD for the past six months. TI always says my back-up images are good and I thought I was protected.

Now in reading through the forums and seeing all the problems restoring RAID drives, I have zero confidence in my back-ups! I really can't feel comfortable not knowing that when the "manure hits the fan" will my "good" images actually restore? I have accumulated six months of use on this computer, and really don't want to save everything so I can do a clean install if the TI back-up fails, but I MUST test out TI to see if it is going to work.

My only solution is to buy a pair of new drives, use them to replace the existing Raptors, and try a restore in my computer as a RAID 0 array. My question is, do you think I need to buy two Raptors (I have the 37.6gig size) or could I just use two regular 40gig HD's? Since I can buy regular HD's at almost half the price of a Raptor, I would much rather do that. My thought is that it shouldn't make any difference in the specs of the drives used in the array, to test if my restores will be functional under the Intel ICH5 SATA chip my Abit MB uses. I know Acronis "says" TI supports this chip, but I still don't feel confident of this after reading about all the trouble TI has with RAID.

Any thoughts?

 

HI,
I'm just browsing thru the forum to verfiy a special problem....
Concerning your thougts: I just moved data from a raid to a single disk and back to the raid. All done by CLONE DISK within the TI Manager. It all works fine.

 

What RAID controler does your MB use?

 

I cant say Raid 0 is the best raid to use but i gather from you saying RAID 0 and MB its a motherboard with onboard raid. Which TI are you using? how are you backing up your raid?

I have done several restores and backups of raid machines each having different types of raid controllers and i havent really had any serious problems.

SOFTWARE RAID = easiest to backup and this works 100% of the time

HARDWARE RAID is more likely to fail because of lack of support, HOWEVER TI Server always works for me. The TI Corp and TI8 tend to have hte most problems? Maybe its because they cant backup while the drives are in use?

If your so unsure about TI you can always RAID the drives and partition them. Then backup the partitions using TI which works fine