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A comment on Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping ... by j45 on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:49AM (#50016478)
A raid is one layer and one copy in a backup.

Inherently to inner copy it provides some redundancy.

Backups need more than one copy.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping ... by ehe78qhe on Friday October 09, 2026 @02:03AM (#50016568)
RAID is not a backup because anything happening within that file system happens to both drives immediately.
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Re:Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping ... by tmountain on Friday October 09, 2026 @02:51AM (#50016944)
ZFS snapshots can help, but this is one layer of a comprehensive backup strategy.
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Re:Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping ... by j45 on Friday October 09, 2026 @06:12AM (#50018418)
both drives? Only 2 mirrored drives isn't really what a RAID can be.

Constructing a RAID5 with 4 drives provides failover and recovery if one of the drives dies.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping ... by lultimouomo on Friday October 09, 2026 @08:24AM (#50019483)
You can have as much redundancy as you like on your RAID, but if you fat finger an rm -r it's all gone.

A real backup protects both against hardware faults and accidental deletion.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping ... by j45 on Friday October 09, 2026 @10:32AM (#50021076)
I’m not implying Raid 5 on its own is a complete backup.

Within a storage array though it does provide redundancy at that level, and generally speaking most people don’t access a raid or NAS at a shell level only where they drop rm -fr’s

Separate and offsite backups are non negotiable, however running a raid 5 locally can greatly reduce storage rebuild/restore time, if a single drive fails the rest of the raid continues to work fine until replaced.

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