*tucks plaid scarf into ironic sweater vest* "It's a small indie brand, you wouldn't have heard of it."

Actually, we're just as you describe, tons of Dell in the computer room and on the desktop. No real troubles with any of it, and anything that needs to be replaced is quickly handled.

Probably more like 12 years, if WIkipedia and the U.S. Govt are right about this bust drying up 90% of the world's LSD supply: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard

There's nothing foolish about it, he's wrong. That is, provided you continue to keep up-to-date with patches. Given two equal SSH daemons, both fully updated but one on a random high port, the one listening on 22 will log hundreds or thousands of attempts per day, the one on a random port will log *zero*. Which do you think makes log auditing easier to look for truly dangerous threats? (If you see failures on your "obscured" SSH daemon, you _know_ you have a problem because someone has fully scanned your address(es) and is actively attempting a break in, while those attempts just disappear in the noise on the port 22 daemon). Similarly, if/when that next SSH 0-day hits, which of the two is in immediate danger of being rooted? The one that is in the logs of dozens or hundreds of scanning script kiddies, or the one that has never been hit a single time by an unknown user, that nobody in the world even knows exists?

The RAID 1 solution gives you resiliency, not safety. RAID 1 doesn't help you at all in that "Oh shit" moment where you've just mistyped a destructive command or deleted the wrong folder. It covers you when a drive dies. not when the virus-of-the-day goes nuts on your data. It's so cheap to do a much simpler backup solution than what was discussed above, there's just no reason not to. You can get any simple external drive and copy everything important to you, and you're better off than running only a RAID solution. The difficulty is the discipline to maintain it, and copying everything everytime isn't efficient. That's where "true" backup solutions come in and get you doing automated backups at full and incremental levels, eliminating forgetfulness and/or laziness. Now you want a 2nd external drive, so you can write backups to one for a week, then take it offsite and swap in the second, which will get your backups for the next week and so on. In the case of a flood/fire/tornado/theft, you do stand to lose up to a week's worth of data, but that's better than losing absolutely everything, which is what happens with your RAID solution. Backup doesn't have to cost a lot. 2 $100 external drives and something like Bacula, or BackupPC, or one of many other options can take care of you.