1. Affordability: Costly Hardware & Admin

RAID Arrays cost many hundreds to many thousands of dollars; You must purchase and maintain RAID the controllers and dedicated hard drives. To manage RAID properly (RAID 5) you also will need to purchase a dedicated server that supports Hot-Swap Hard Drives, Several Hot-swap Hard Drives and spares, and a SCSI RAID controller. The Server, the RAID controller and the Hard Drive firmware will need periodic updates, and eventually will need replaced as technology standards change. All this will have to be maintained by either in-house staff or highly paid consultants.

2. Reliability: Failure-Prone Drives, Data Corruption

Software mirrors are notoriously problematic. They will slow system performance and the often fail when you need them the most, when one hard drive dies. Hardware RAID is more robust, but it can only protect you from the failure of a single hard drive. The real purpose of Hardware RAID is not data protection at all, but to increase access speed. Even the best RAID Array scheme is still very vulnerable to data corruption, viruses, hackers, and disgruntled employees.

Hard drives can and do fail, and if you have not run consistency checks regularly on the RAID array, you may be unable to rebuild the failed drive. What if you lose two hard drives at once? Often the very issue that caused the hard drive failure will kill more than one drive at a time. Power surges, brownouts or blackouts -- like California experienced again and again a few years ago -- will often kill several hard drives at once. A RAID Controller gone bad, a CPU that goes bad, or even a bad stick of RAM can corrupt your data quickly - leaving you with a whole array of corrupt data!

3. Data Protection: Not Offsite is Not Alright

Unless your data is taken offsite every night you fail to protect data against natural disasters (fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, lightning, solar flares and earthquakes), not to mention theft, disgruntled employees and sabotage.

4. Data Security: Physical Location = Inherent Risks

Where is your server and RAID array stored? Do you have a dedicated server room with controlled access? Or could someone willfully or accidentally pull the plug on the server and compromise your data? Even with a dedicated server room, accidents can and do happen. Is your data being backed up offsite every day? If not your business is at risk!

5. Convenience: Install & Admin Demands

Creating and administering a RAID array and dedicated file server, or even an less complicated IDE mirror system, means getting inside your computers, installing drivers, updating firmware, running consistency checks and more. You can hire an expensive professional, pay a high-priced consultant, or just let RDB protect your data at our two mirrored data centers, using our cutting-edge technology to protect your data and free yourself to run your business. Rest assured, your data is protected with PC Data Backups!

6. The Real Purpose of RAID: A Misconception?

The real purpose of a RAID array is not data backup at all. RAID was created to increase the speed of accessing files (data throughput), and increase the logical size of a "hard drive." Given how often any given hard drive fails, it was essential that RAID be designed with built in redundancy. (The ability to survive the loss of a hard drive, and replace the failed drive without a system crash.) But don't confuse hard drive redundancy with a true Backup - no IT professional worth his salt would ever consider using RAID as a substitute for a reliable daily backup - and neither should you. Protect yourself with PC Data Backups!

7. Remote File Access: Costly, Insecure, Network

Unless you have a dedicated Remote Access Server (RAS) or a Virtual Private Network, you can't readily access data stored on your RAID array. This is an expensive scheme, and it will also end up creating a potential security threat to all your network and your data! PC Data Backups uses AES encryption, the same encryption that our Federal government uses to transmit classified documents. You can easily configure any of your accounts to be able to access data securely from any other account.

8. File Versioning: Not Available

RAID Arrays only keep one file version. With PC Data Backups, we keep up to 10-File versions. Did you make an unwanted change to an active file that you now wish you hadn't made? You can easily retrieve an older version.

9. Full System Backup: Only with RAID 1

You can back up your entire hard drive with RAID 1 (a mirror). But with a software mirror, recovery typically is an extremely cumbersome, time intensive and failure-prone process. A Hardware MIRROR (RAID -0) is more robust, but is also much more expensive and still only protects you against one type of data loss - hard drive failure. With any RAID array you still need a TRUE BACKUP SOLUTION - PC Data Backups is automatic, and protects your critical data, securely, and offsite each night!

10. Support: Hiring High-Paid Professionals

Do you have a highly skilled technology staff to handle the administration of your RAID array and server? Or will you have to pay high priced professional consultants to service and maintain them? Why not use our state-of-the-art data centers to backup your data and utilize our Free Support staff. Our 10 GB backup plan costs less than $1 a day! Even if you use RAID, you still need reliable backup, why not use PC Data Backups!