Why do Windows users, especially server users need to backup RAID drive? This is easy to answer, but to RAID users, there are two questions they may ask, "Does the software compatible with RAID?" "Is it easy, safe and fast to clone RAID drive?" They have to find and compare with the candidates.
Is it possible to backup RAID in a safe and easy way? The answer is yes and this article will introduce a great solution to backup RAID with a RAID backup software.
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, which is a technology that employs the simultaneous use of two or more hard disk drives to achieve greater levels of performance, reliability, and/or larger data volume sizes. When several physical disks are set up to use RAID technology, they are said to be in a RAID array which distributes data among several disks. Meanwhile, the array is seen as one single disk by the users and Operating System.
RAID makes use of two or more hard drives in order to improve performance, reliability or create larger data volumes. The former is achieved through striping, whereby data is split and written across multiple drives to increase throughput, and reliability can be improved by introducing redundancy. An example of this is a mirrored RAID array, whereby data is written to more than one disk so that in the event of a single disk failure, an exact copy of the original data still remains.
Usually, there are 3 most commonly used RAID levels as follows:
Level | Description | Minimum No. of Disks | Image |
---|---|---|---|
RAID 0 | Striped set without parity/ [Non-Redundant Array]. | 2 | |
RAID 1 | Mirrored set without parity. | 2 | |
RAID 5 | Striped set with distributed parity. | 3 |
RAID is really used to its full potential in emergency services and business where data reliability and performance are essential. Meanwhile, backing up the operating system and RAID by the RAID backup software is important to avoid downtime.
Tutorial: How to backup Windows Server RAID with Windows Server backup software?
You can save the image archive to local hard disk, tape, LAN computer disk or CD/DVD. Besides backing up to an image archive, you may also clone the virtual disk to replace or upgrade the old one by this RAID backup software.