Posted by NunYa Bidness on 11/15/55 11:33

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 20:52:36 -0500, Jeff Rife <wevsr@nabs.net> Gave
us:

>
>Mirroring is not backup. Anyone who thinks so is just fooling themselves.
>When the hard drive controller loses its mind an re-formats your disk,
>you've lost your "backup".

You're nuts for assigning a single definition to a term.

If one installs a removable drive and mirrors the contents of a
target drive for backup, the entire contents get covered, and no, the
"controller" doesn't reformat your drive. The controller is ON the
hard drive on IDE drives. That is the very nature of the drive.
Integrated Drive Electronics. That is what replaced MFM, the method
that DID require an external "controller".

The INTERFACE on the MOBO or add-in card is just that... a mere
interface bus. No controller is on the MOBO or add-in card.

Also, they don't "lose their mind and reformat your disc".

At the very worst, a power loss during a write operation could occur
and one could lose SOME of the data on a backup drive (not the read
drive) as the still energized head retracts, spraying stray bits
across the platter. Not a likely scenario though, and no more
vulnerable than such a power outage would be to an optical write
session. In fact, optical write sessions are more vulnerable as the
computer's background processes can interrupt a session at any time.
Trashed discs result. With an HD backup failure, all one needs to do
is restart the backup again in a new session.

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