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I'm about to do a migration from Raid-5 to Raid-10 and add some hard drives. But before I do that I think it's good to have a complete offline backup. So I have a 1 TB external hard drive ready to put the backup on. But what software do you use for such an important backup? In the past I used Ghost, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea considering this is a Raid system. And in case of a failure I don't want the Domain Controller to freak out.

Any suggestions?

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You don't mention what version of Windows you're using, but if it's 2008 or later, the built in Windows Server Backup is fine for this. You can use those backups for bare-metal recovery and for file-level recovery. It's also AD aware.

That said, you should be doing normal backups anyway! Especially if this is a DC!

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  • It's indeed a Windows 2008 SBS. Of course we have daily backups with Symantec Backup, but for this purpose I would like to have a full backup in case (for whatever reason) the raid migration fails. Does WSB backups everything? I've running an old VMware server on top of the SBS that is running a 2008 RDS. Jun 13, 2012 at 12:53
  • Yes. It uses VSS to get a full backup of everything. Obviously, you should test this like you should test any other backup, but it does full bare-metal.
    – MDMarra
    Jun 13, 2012 at 12:55
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As long as you have a healthy Smart Array RAID controller battery and disks, the array transformation from RAID 5 to RAID 1+0 is pretty safe. It's not particularly risky. In terms of backup, you should be backing the system up anyway... So I'd rely on that as a fallback.

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