RSync is an open source program that provides incremental file transfer for both local and remote files. RSync comes pre-installed on most unix and linux based systems (including Mac OS X) but distributions are available for most popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows (e.g. cwrsync).

This article will focus on how to setup a personal backup using one of the suddenly ubiquitous shared hosting companies like DreamHost, LunarPages or BlueHost. If you already have a account with one of these companies it won’t cost you anything to start backing up your data to a remote server. If you don’t already have an account and want to setup online backup you have two choices:

1. Forget RSync, save yourself some trouble - sign up with one of the online backup services like Mozy which is priced nearly identically to a shared hosting account.
2. Buy a hosting account and forge ahead - if you’re reading this you probably want to get your hands a little dirty and a shared hosting account lets you do all sorts of neat things like host your own domain, web apps, etc.

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RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives. The purpose of RAID is to increase one or some combination of the following: performance, reliability, and larger data volume sizes. RAID systems distribute data across two or more disks to gain these advantages.

Why do you care? You should care if you are a computer user with large data storage requirements who uses a single hard drive for archiving your files. Obviously if your drive fails you are going to be in a world of hurt. With a RAID system, you set it up once and then don’t think about it again until a drive fails, at which point you won’t lose any data, you just replace the failed drive and move along.

RAID is an umbrella term for a few distinct systems which are identified by number. We will only discuss the RAID configurations that a typical computer user might use to achieve data redundancy and therefore fault tolerance.

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