RAID is great if all you're worried about is HDD failure (and you get a bonus speed boost). But doesn't have the handy features that cloning offers of being able to revert to previous versions of software...
I have been using drive to drive cloning for years on all of my computers and it has saved my ass many times. I use removable HD bays and Western Digital cloning software which comes with every retail box WD hard drive. I think all hard drive manufactures have free software for drive to drive copy (cloning).
I heartily disagree... RAID: "The phrase "RAID" is an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple hard disk drives. RAID's various designs all involve two key design goals: increased data reliability and increased input/output performance."
Even the latest Acrionis TrueImage release just updates to an existing image; there is no equivalent of the Casper smartclone feature, yet.
There was a time when that didn't work very well. I used to use those packaged HDD copy programs for cloning, but at some point in the transition from Win2K to XP, it no longer worked. Likely the HDD makers are now including a more robust version... Still, the ability of Acronis to image and to restore an image from a boot disk makes it valuable. And when Acronis also offers "incremental cloning" like CasperXP, all the bases will be covered.
Maybe! If you just set up RAID "1" you are creating a duplicate disk in real-time. If you set up RAID "0" you are gaining a speed advantage but do not get the redundacy the poster is looking for. If you set up RAID "5" you get speed and redundancy. RAID 0 and 1 require two disks, RAID 5, three. There are other RAID capabilities but these are the three most commonly used by us little guys. Of course none of this protects you from a failure of your RAID hardware (or software) so Acronis is the way to go. I personally do RAID 1 and Acronis on a weekly basis. Jack