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>
>I don't know the advantages (if any) of using mirroring software or what
>overhead you might encounter by forcing live real-time back-ups, but I
>assume it would be substantial and would also degrade the speed and
>performance of your overall system -- not to mention the questionable
>necessity of live "on-the fly" mirroring in the real world.
Having built mirroring software, I can say with certainity that if the
software is written well the overhead should be minimal (the writes can
be overlapped to both drives by the software). As to it's necessity, I'm
inclined to agree with you. Mirroring protects against hardware failure
on the drive or the controller, but not anything else. If some piece of
software, which shall remain nameless to protect me from lawsuits but
comes from Seattle, decides that it's not happy and write over your disk,
your mirror system will happily trash both disks. On the other hand, if
you need instant recovery from hard disk problems and you're willing to
pay for it, disks are cheap these days. But don't forget to do tape/cd
rom/JAZ backups. If your software goes crazy or your motherboard dies or
your house/office burns down, having a tape backup may make the
difference between a trip to the computer store and going out of business.
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