[ITstudent2006]

I am in my Netw141 class and I noticed that my instructor simply added another primary partition to his Hard Drive and that was where he backs up all of his stuff. I know when you create a primary partition the hard drive see's it has another physical drive, but in essence if your hard drive fails won't both partitions (both your active and second) be destroyed? So what is the point in backing up on the same disk?

[Scleros]

I know when you create a primary partition the hard drive see's it has another physical drive...

No, the operating system may see it as another logical drive.

So what is the point in backing up on the same disk?

When developing a backup strategy, there are different types of failure mode considerations that can be addressed with varying cost and hardware complexity. Your instructor's backup strategy will protect against file corruption. Perhaps that's all he's concerned about.

You're concerned about impending drive failure. Protecting against this failure mode requires a different strategy. So in this case, there is no point in backing up to the same disk. Backing up to another disk or running a mirrored RAID array would protect against single drive failure. However, note that a mirrored array may not protect against file corruption. It is possible for both members of the mirror to be corrupted.

So, I find the easiest and least expensive end-to-end backup solution when needing to recover is a drive imaging solution that periodically copies an image of the primary drive or a RAID 5 array to a single internal or external drive. If a drive fails in the array, simply pop the failed drive out, pop a new one in, array rebuilds, and the computer keeps on humming. If the array gets corrupted, one of the point-in-time images from the backup drive can be restored with minimal downtime. The imaging schedule can be set as desired for risk tolerance - hourly, daily, weekly, etc.

[ITstudent2006]

OK, that all makes perfect sense. I am unworried about corrupted files only because most of my files I am worrying about is music, pics and vids which are all non-vitale.

According to my Microsoft Netw141 Vista Config. Book Windows Vista does not support RAID5. It states" Windows Vista supports only three of these volume types : simple, spanned and striped." So does that mean it won't do mirror imaging or RAID 5 or is that referring to your Hard Disk after you change it from basic to dynamic?