RAID really needed?

sup so yeah Raid is good and is really good at creating large volumes and regarded as a "safety net" as to prevent data loss. but is it really needed if you stay on top of your data backups? other words you run a backup job once a month or your data don't change often. now if you changed/added data once a week or was real lazy with your backups then i could see it. if you had a drive in raid array fail you'd replace the whole lot of drives anyway cause of the likely hood that another one would die soon.

RAID is not a replacement for frequent backups.
RAID is for increasing uptime through fault tolerance and/or creating large data pools.

RAID is for servers, especially those providing storage to other services. Not worth it in your personal computers.

Raid can be viewed as a backup that covers less cases than actual backups. They basically only cover harddrive failures. It's used when the freshest data has significant value.

Without RAID you are pretty much guaranteed to experience a failed drive one day.
Even with daily backups I'd rather not.

My laptop doesn't have RAID but I upload my work several times a day.
Losing a couple hours work is acceptable to me but not an entire day.

HDDs make mistakes.

I will never not use an advanced filesystem with redundancy.
RAID 1
RAIDz1
RAID 10
Every machine I own runs on one.

It is only meant for data availability and uptime.

At best, it is greasy-ass junk-food as far as a back-up solution.

RAIDs are slowly giving away to SAN solutions

RAID is for servers dummy

>is really good at creating large volumes and regarded as a "safety net" as to prevent data loss
No, it's not. RAID serves for redundancy, not as a backup. If you want to prevent data loss, schedule and deploy a backup strategy.
>backup
>backup
>backup
It can't be helped I guess.

>server stores data on RAID
>one drive dies
>server keeps on serving while hot spare goes online and/or tech swaps out bad drive

or

>server stores data one drive
>one drive dies
>tech: "sry, no data for next few hours or days"

or

>server is in the cloud
>I saved the company money by eliminating 1 tech position
>get promoted to manager

>Rely on someone else's computer with no backup
>IOT botnet crushes the east coast DNS
>Lose your job because you planned no backup and have to wait out the next 48 hours of 200 PB/s bandwidth denial

What a bright future we live in.

>blame problem on open source
>retire with golden parachute

FTFY

Trust me, RAID, even in a home sever environment, will one day save your ass a lot of time/grief if the unexpected should happen. True story: Went on week vacation out of state, came home exhausted was fun time though. No mood to do much except crash. Got up next day and checked server logs. Discovered a failed drive that apparently kicked the bucket Tuesday (during the time I was gone). Array was still intact. Quickly did a backup. Ordered a new drive from newegg. Replaced drive once it came in. Array rebuilt, no data loss. Happy times all around. This was back when 1TB drives was considered huge.

Remember kiddies, raid is shit unless you have backups and a ups to go with it. say your server loses power, array rebuilds itself (parity bits ya know). all you've done is rebuilt an array with possible corrupt files/data tossed in introduced with the power failure. you won't know it, the raid controller can't detect it, only way is when you play back/view a file and it has garbage in it when before it was fine. ZFS won't save you from this either, power loss effects everything.

Still can't figure out what the fuck you guys are storing that requires so much attention. Between my school stuff on the cloud, my iPad, two desktops, and two laptops I have

You'll find out when you get older.

ZFS will cover your ass if it cuts during a rebuild. Everything is top-down and checksumed.
Keep an slog if live data is important.

But I agree that not having a backup is just retarded even on ZFS.

RAID is not a backup.
RAID is used for improving system uptime.
RAID is also used for performance (24 drives in RAID10 will beat anything under NVME ssds).

>RAID is also used for performance (24 drives in RAID10 will beat anything under NVME ssds).
*Sequential performance, it'll total a low-end ssd in IOPs

If you have decent internet cloud storage is the way to go

>but muh botnet
Just encrypt your files before sending them

RAID is not backup, but it is totally worth it.

I strongly disagree. RAID is for everything you want up and running without downtime due to stupidly not using RAID.

I use RAID1 on my desktops SSD boot drive with a spinning drive in --write-mostly. It reads from the SSD and data is written to both. If the SSD dies then that's fine. The storage on it is in RAID5 since it's only 3 drives. My home server is using RAID6.

If you never had a HDD or SSD fail then you probably think it's not worth using RAID. I've had plenty of HDDs and a few SSDs fail. This caused me pain 15 years ago and I've been using some RAID level for everything ever since.

To me RAID isn't really about backups. If you have one HDD and it fails and you do have backups then your data is fine. Now you have to install the OS and configure your computer and hour or days later you're recovering from your backup, hoping that there's not too much you're missing between the time your HDD die and the time you made your backup. If you were using RAID you'd just be replacing a HDD and you'd be done in 5 minutes.

RAID is not backup.

If you accidentally delete a file, or if a virus infects your system, are you fucked? If yes, then it is not backup.