[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Ugh, god why? Why must people in our industry daydream about over-complicating things all the time? Very few use-cases benefit significantly from mirrored disks. The amount of data a user actually cares about having a backup of is often significantly smaller than the OS and related garbage on a disk that they can do without. Besides which, a local mirror isn't a good backup anyway!

[derekp7]

My thinking is that this would serve a similar purpose to the trend for web browsers to warn users of insecure websites -- the more "in your face" the warnings are, the more incentive there is for providers to be secure.

I've had friends / relatives experience drive failure a few time in the past, and the look of horror they have when there is very little I can do to help them recover their photos etc. is something that I hate seeing.

And having the OS give a simple warning (that can be dismissed, with a "don't show me this any more" checkbox) would not over complicate things, and may end up saving some people's data.

Really no different than the current warning that Windows has, when you don't have antivirus installed. Or the fasten seatbelt signal that comes on the dashboard of your car when you start it. Or the flashing red light that gets added to some stop sign controlled intersections.

Also it would be nice if there was a standard way that backup software could inform the OS of backup status (this way it would serve as a secondary check in case the backup software's internal reporting fails to notify the user of bad backups). Just a little nice-to-have.

(I'm not advocating for this to be a legal requirement, just a nice feature if any OS vendor wants to add it).

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> My thinking is that this would serve a similar purpose to the trend for web browsers to warn users of insecure websites -- the more "in your face" the warnings are, the more incentive there is for providers to be secure.

Another thing I hate about the industry today: being hostile to the user and trying to force them to use their computer how you want them to use it.

> I've had friends / relatives experience drive failure a few time in the past, and the look of horror they have when there is very little I can do to help them recover their photos etc. is something that I hate seeing.

Then teach them about proper backups. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand "don't keep all your eggs in one basket". Or if you're going to implement some stupid forced user-hostile scheme at least use something that actually qualifies as a backup.

> And having the OS give a simple warning (that can be dismissed, with a "don't show me this any more" checkbox) would not over complicate things, and may end up saving some people's data.

Here's what will happen: the user will dismiss the dialog without even reading it. We have decades of experience showing us this. Users have learned that "warning" dialogs are meaningless precisely because of crap like this. Oh yeah, and they're super annoying.

> Really no different than the current warning that Windows has, when you don't have antivirus installed.

Exactly my point.

[ghaff]

I've looked into RAID at home but came to the conclusion that there are plenty of easier/cheaper ways to do backup. I just use USB drives, have a couple rotating Time Machine backups plus Backblaze. (Plus, when I think of it once a year or so, I have one more copy of my main data disk that I keep in a fire box.)

I don't really use Windows but you can do something similar--though in my experience it's not as simple.

I don't really care if I avoid any downtime. So long as I have belt and suspenders backups, I'm pretty comfortable.