Rant: Backup and me

I've been looking for (almost being obsessed of finding) reliable and faster performance solution for data storage for years after recorderable CD crashed and burned important documents and all my school papers all the way from high school. Having used MO for years, its performance and its requirement to swap disk for large data were not practical as using hard drive as backup media. It's okay to backup small files to MO disk but was pain if I need to backup more than a gigabyte of data. I usually had to start copying process and leaved the computer overnight. It was that slow.

For me, a hard drive is the only choice for backup solution. I used RAID 1 for backuping data the most of last two years or so. Crashed the RAID due to faulty hard drive a few times and had to go throw painful rebuilding process. Onboard RAID just sucks. Having RAID on main computer caused a accidental deletion of its file system. Had to go throw painful recovery process and fixed the problem by removing writing permission on RAID, only to administrator account. And early this year, my power supply just gave up, unable to supply the power to RAID. Few years old 400Watts power supply no longer supply the system that needs about 360Watts. I'm using external hard drive for backup now, no RAID, no redundant backup.

Now I have too many hard drives (most of them is at end of its age) but no solid backup system. Only two hard drives which I used in RAID are little less than a year old and bigger than the rest of the hard drive combined. I have no idea whether I need to move to new backup solution. Maybe I need to consider using notebook hard drive for RAID system to save power. Or deleting some of files before backing a folder.