Who's at fault?
When files
are lost, people start looking for blame. It’s got to be somebody’s
fault. Nobody wants to do work over and over. Instead of looking for
blame, let’s make the computer fault tolerant. Mama’s computer has
one hard drive. All of Mama’s eggs are literally in one basket. If
that drive failed, years of work would be scrambled!
Or Fault Tolerant?
One excellent solution is to mirror two drives. Whatever is written
to the primary drive is simultaneously saved on an identical drive.
It works like this: if one drive fails, the system stays up and
functioning until a replacement drive is available. This is as good
as it gets for small offices. <grin>
Windows needs some hardware to create disk mirroring. You need two
hard drives (preferably identical drives) and a RAID controller.
RAID means “redundant array of independent drives.” Statistically,
the odds of losing one drive are higher than you want to think
about. Losing two, three, or four drives is a much lower
probability.
