Is RAID the solution to safeguard my external drive data?

Question

I have a 1TB WD My Book attached to my iMac, which has about 10 years worth of 'stuff' on it. My son's baby pictures are probably the most precious in all of that.
I have another external 320GB hard drive connected that I use for Time Machine.
Recently, I thought I lost the WD My Book and my heart skipped a few beats - stopped - then kicked back into life. Needless to say, I'm very anxious at the moment.
I was thinking of getting another 1TB WD My Book (it's quite a bit cheaper now :-)), daisy chain the two drives, and create a RAID 1 set of the two 1TB drives.
Could the wise and kind souls of this forum advise if this would work, and indeed, if it is the best option for what I want to do?
I have toyed with getting a Drobo, but that company does not retail to Malaysia at this time.
Thank you.

Answer 1

azsharom wrote:
I have a 1TB WD My Book attached to my iMac, which has about 10 years worth of 'stuff' on it. My son's baby pictures are probably the most precious in all of that..
I guess my main consideration for RAID was that it would be 'real time mirroring/cloning' but since my data isn't mission critical - but more 'sentimentally critical', a Super Duper routine that does a copy of the 2 drives every time I shutdown, or something along those lines, may suffice.
If your most precious data is currently only on one drive, then a constant mirroring solution or daily connected clone solution is the wrong next step. You're skipping a more important step. You need to have a backup that is off site, or at the very least, usually disconnected or read-only.
Even with your current proposal, your data is too vulnerable. You could lose it in these ways.
a. A fire destroys the home. Both original drive and backup are destroyed.
b. A burglar steals your entire computer system, including all connected drives. Which means he also has your backup drive, and you have nothing.
c. A lightning strike hits your home electrical system. The computer and all connected peripherals are fried.
d. A glitch or bug corrupts a critical file, but you don't notice. That night, your backup routine copies that day's changes to your backup disk. Later, you try to open the critical file, but you discover that the original is corrupted, and the backup is also corrupted because the last good version got written over with the bad copy during the backup. You no longer have a good copy of that file.
If you don't already have your baby pictures and other similarly critical data already copied to a disk that is not always connected to your system, you are vulnerable to the above and more. If your most critical files fit on a few DVDs, put them on DVDs and store them at another location, like a relative's house or a safe deposit box. I do clone to external drives, but I only connect them during the backup; when not backing up they are locked away in a safe so that if something bad happens to the computer, maybe it won't also happen to the backup. And there is more than one backup drive so that I can have more than one version and one is kept off site and rotated in occasionally. And I started using Time Machine for more frequent backups, and more versions of changed files.
Automatic online mirror/clone or Time Machine = near term backups, can't be an archive
Multiple hard drives rotated off site = protection against disasters to on site storage
Read-only media like DVDs = long term archives of irreplaceable files