We had 3 systems fail last month.  3 Servers crashed and were left as an unbootable pile of computer parts.  In all three cases we were able to restore the systems with no data loss.

The funny thing, all three systems had a RAID system in place.  Did this help?  Not really.

Why?  Well, RAID is great if you have a hardware failure in which one of the physical disk drives fail.  Then your alerted and you replace the drive and all is well.

What happens if Windows get’s corrupted due to an update?  Or someone deletes a file, or a database?  RAID is just a fancy word for duplicating your data.  If someone deletes a file, it’s gone from all the drives in the RAID system.  If windows burps and gets corrupted, it’s corrupted on all the drives in the RAID system.  RAID is not backup.  RAID is just a layer of protection in case a hard disk fails.

Hard disk failure is just *one* of a myriad of ways in which a system could loose data.  RAID is not a substitute for a backup.  A backup system allows you to travel back in time and recover data that was lost/corrupt.  A backup system is a series of snapshots of your data.   A RAID system is a single snapshot of your data that is continuously destroyed and recreated every time the data changes.

RAID is not a backup.