Why is RAID not a backup?

RAID guards against one kind of hardware failure. There’s lots of failure modes that it doesn’t guard against.

  • File corruption
  • Human error (deleting files by mistake)
  • Catastrophic damage (someone dumps water onto the server)
  • Viruses and other malware
  • Software bugs that wipe out data
  • Hardware problems that wipe out data or cause hardware damage (controller malfunctions, firmware bugs, voltage spikes, …)

and more.

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