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No to data loss
John Siracusa has a proposal: dual RAID drives as standard equipment in consumer PCs. There are some arguments against in the comments (how do you market it, given that you can't claim it's as safe as real backups?) but we're at the point that it's worth thinking about. One poster suggests that Apple should make their Backup application standard equipment, but by all accounts I've heard, it sucks.
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RAID 1 that isn't RAID 1? Lets be honest here. RAID 1 isn't the way to go. Even if it's RAID 1 esque, it still fails because of the weaknesses inherent to RAID 1. "What happens if the controller writes bad data to both disks?" "What happens if the user deletes the data?" "What happens if some nefarious program does it?" The only thing RAID 1 protects aganist is the failure of a single disk.
Agreed. All the hardware in the world is easily trumped by the Chair to Keyboard interface. I've only heard of a Raid controller going out once, and it took the entire array right (raid 5 with some 6 disks) with it. That server was down for three or four days as they had to get another controller shipped in and then they had to restore everything from a backup.
Aganist the multitude of threats, I think apple can do better by easing the process of backing up on optical media. OR, if you're intent on the RAID 1 idea, then a multitiered method where both the RAID 1 idea and an actual "backup" method is used such that you can somewhat protect aganist accidental deletion or hardware corruption writing to the disk. "Insert a DVD, Click this button, and your settings are saved". "Insert a DVD, click this button, and your music is saved", etc. Sure, if it needs to span extra disks, then the system will prompt for it, and it'll be done. In fact, I think if you ask users which files are mission critical, Most users won't have even a full CD's worth of files. Music is most times replaceable. Game files are tough to lose, but it won't kill you. So you're basically left with, documents, images, and financial files for joe blow/jane doe user. The first and the last are many times small, and the images (family photographs), IF there are more than 4.5Gbytes worth, which is odd for a normal user, can de dealt with easily enough via spanning.
Again, more wisdom here. If I boiled the 40 GB drive in my work laptop down to the critical files i need, I'd have about 3 GB total, and that includes some files that I could probably recreate or restore from the internet. That would easily fit on a DVD.
However, if there's one area where I think Apple can surpass the windows world, it's 'settings'. "I liked it when x program looked like y and behaved like z, and if the computer crashes, I have to make it look like y and behave like z again". When I ask most of my friends what they really dread if they're forced to restore from backup, it's the settings and not really the data loss.
Right on the money. The only instance that I had that the data trumped the settings was the Executive director of the reigon for where I work. In that case, we sent the drive out for recovery at a cost of nearly 3 grand...
Raid-1 (disk mirroring) only makes it a 50% change of critical loss in the event of a failure. It's not practical for laptops, unless you remove the optical drive (and I've been down the road. No fricken way!) or make the machine bigger. Plus there is the added wight , heat, and power consumption. One of the comment suggested putting it in a docking station which I fully support. Docking stations are 'teh bamb', and well worth the cost, IMHO. I wonder why they went away.
Raid 5 at a consumer level is still waay to expensive. a Flash cache is not cost effective either ,due to the fact that flash memory has a life time measures in read/write cycles. the best RAID5 cards use a battery backed memory cache in case of power failure. those cards are quite expensive (over $1000), but provide a reliability in the upper 95% area.
XP makes it mostly easy to back up and restore data: Almost everything is in the user's profile: Outlook's PST files, their 'My Documents' folder, their settings, their bookmarks, and even their browser cache and history. This makes backing it up pretty painless, except that you have to be logged in as someone else in order to back it up or restore it. (that's a limitation of XP's filesystem: It can't touch files in use.) I'm not quite sure how OS X does it, frankly, but I imagine that it's somthing similar.
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Your giant media files can stay on disk platters. You can spin up the disk when you want to watch TV or listen to music, and your machines can be more or less slobs about managing those media files: replicate them between machines or whatever (they are opaque and non-versionned anyways so you can use a content-addressed sync algorithm), don't worry about backups or data loss, etc.
The actually valuable excel/quicken/outlook/word files, IE/firefox settings and passwords etc. all easily fit on keyring flash.
This is all doable today (some people already do) but it should be made much easier, an OS-managed concept with a normal API (on windows for example, perhaps HKEY_CURRENT_USER or whatever subsection of the registry goes in the private area).
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I hate being on hold while holding a teeny cellphone.