Customer Support/Idiot Father-proof RAID 1 Array

[Soichiro]

Recently one of my friends had a 54 page story she had written deleted because some retard from Dell tech support told her dad to format the computer, and unfortunately the partition was unrecoverable. So today I got the brilliant idea of building her a new comp (her current one sucks anyway) with 2 hard drives in a RAID 1 array. That seemed like a good idea, until I realized that it would only protect from HDD crashes and not from idiots formatting it. So now I need to know if there's any way to set up a RAID array (preferably RAID 1 since that's built-in on most motherboards) that prevents one of the drives from being formatted. I'm guessing no, but there's hopefully something...

 

[Know Nuttin]

There aren't many ways to protect humans from themselves and their actions unfortunately. The only way to do so is to back up important items in several different places and always work on a copy, not the original.

Depending on where the file was located on the drive, you may be able to get the file off using data recovery software. If the sectors were overwritten though, it's very doubtful that it will be successful. It's worth a try though.

 

[Larry Quinn]

Quick and dirty fix would be to install 2 drives, leave one "C" and another make something else like "Z".

Write a batch file that copies everything from C to Z and setup a scheduled task to run that batch file at a certain time at night.

Or create a "Virtual Folder" on C and name it something for her.
Make that folder point to a directory on the other hard drive.
Whenever she wants to save files, tell her to save it to that virtual folder.

Fomat the C till your blue in the face..and her data will still be safe on the other drive.

Or just cut out everything, and tell her to save all her files on the other drive rather than the C drive...after her loss..I'm sure she will always remember!

Those are free options after you buy hardware.

Other products like Ghost will do similar things....

Just off the top of my head ...

And don't forget there may be more elegant solututions like tape or hard drive based backup solutions.

Larry

 

[shadowdr]

Ghost is your best option with a second hard drive.I backup full partitions weekly and disable the drive in device manager.This protects against drive slow death,sudden death and any type of file corruption and will only be seen in dos mode.Raid1 has a really slow write speed and only protects against sudden drive death.

 

[Dukeman]

Another alternative would be to get her an external drive that automatically backs up every week.

 

[Sleepy_Steve]

find the dell tech support building... remove phone lines

find the dad.... remove hands


im not entrely sure of the legal ramifications of this course of action, but i think it would prevent further data loss, as well as alowing you to never need to touch the victim computer.

(i just like to think outside the box - an auto backup USB HDD would likley be a better idea)