Windows Backup on Mirrored Drives

[Scoobie]

Hopefully I have this in the right section... I apologize if not.

I have a new computer build where I have Win 7 Pro 64-bit installed on a SSD. Then I have a pair of 1TB drives that I setup as mirroring drives in Disc Management.

I proceeded to setup my windows backup to the mirrored drive, but it is giving me the warning:

When restoring a system image from this volume, the disks on your computer cannot be formatted to match the layout of the disks in the backup. To have full restore functionality, select a volume on basic disk as our backup location.

I am not really sure I even need a backup for the SSD... it is a small 64GB drive strictly for the OS and surfing the net... minor games (wife card games, etc.)... and a few other minor things. I mirrored the 1TB drives because they are going to be our music server on our network for our laptops... as well as we planned to backup our laptops to the 1TB drive. I figured I would mirror the 1TB in case one crashed we would have the backup. A backup of the backup, so to speak. However, if I am having issues with not being able to setup windows backup on these from this computer, I assume I will run into the same issues with the laptop backups.

Is there no way to use windows backup to a mirrored drive? I don't understand why that would be an issue.

Thanks!

 

[TrainableMan]

OK this is just from researching so I don't claim to understand it all ...

Raid drives use "dynamic volumes" and your SSD is a basic volume. This means the partitions are laid out differently so you could probably restore files but what you can't do it a complete restore if something goes wrong because it won't be able to restore partition by partition, sector by sector. And I believe the biggest thing then the Boot sectors won't be restored right so the drive cannot boot up any more.

That is why they suggest you backup to a basic volume. Then you can use complete restore not just file recovery. BTW, it's not saying you cannot back-up to there, just that you may not be able to then use the full restore functionality.

 

[Scoobie]

Well... I ain't really worried about the SSD, but I will have to figure out an alternative for backing up our laptops, because I am assuming they will give me the same error when I attempt to setup backup over the network to that mirrored drive.

Maybe I should change the 1TB back to a basic drive... do my backups to the drive and store my music just as I intended to begin with. Then mirror the drive some other way. I suppose I need to research a bit on mirroring drives.

Thanks!

 

[TrainableMan]

The laptops would encounter the same issue.

Plus another possible issue if your laptops are W7 Starter or Home Premium ... only W7 Professional or Ultimate can use the built-in backup/restore to write the back-up to a network drive.

To be honest most of us don't even like the built-in backup/restore and we use other products such as Acronis or Macrium Reflect instead (See links to possible alternatives in our Freeware DB).

 

[Scoobie]

We have W7 Pro on the laptops. I currently use Windows Backup on my laptop, backing up to the 500GB second drive. It has worked very well thus far. I actually used it to the other day to recover some files that I deleted.