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I'm facing difficulties in regards to some disk issues if you guys can help me. I am using Windows Server 2003 for my File Server. For the past few days in Disk Management the status of two of my (Software RAID 5) disks are marked as "Fails Redundancy" but the disks are still working properly. I'm afraid of losing my data. What do you think I should do?

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Repeat after us: RAID is not a backup. RAID is not a backup. RAID is not a backup. The primary purpose of small-scale RAID is to improve uptime, not to protect data. – Miles Erickson Jan 5 at 14:19
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2 Answers

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I'm afraid of losing my DATA

Anothernon-backup guy bytes the dust? Sorry, you deserver that. MAKE BACKUPS.

the status of two disks which are RAID 5 is (Fails Redundancy) but still the disks are working properly

Funny. Could be part of the disc being bad? Not really heard of that. You already did order the replacement discs? Start regenerating the array. Expect data loss without backup. Start doing backups.

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You seem to get more snide with every new answer. – Graeme Donaldson Jan 4 at 7:34
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Nope, i just lost some data to bacd backups, too. Having a failed raid and assume that a RAID was protecting is "work at McDonalds" qualification level. Tape drives aer not THAT expensive (though the are a little expensive for private people). – TomTom Jan 4 at 8:36
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Graeme - bit of an odd one but while I find TomTom's comments funny I think that ultimately, however rude he comes over - and he does - he's almost always right. For instance this guy's got a 'dicky' raid array, and while we can help him fix it or deal with it one way or another it would be negligent not to very strongly suggest that now's the time to be ensure that he had a working backup system/strategy. Now he can learn this the hard way, probably will in fact, or we can tell him very clearly - TT is often TOO clear but I think it's better than letting it pass by. That's my opinion anyway. – Chopper3 Jan 5 at 14:14
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I'm guessing you have a 3 drive array and one drive has gone which hopefully should leave all your data intact, but your server is reporting you no longer have any redundnacy - i.e. if another drive has a problem, all your data is toast.

Backup all your data as advised by TomTom at the earliest possible opportunity - raid 5 can give problems when rebuilding - I have a test server at home and thought I would borrow a drive for use elsewhere - when I rebuilt the array, pretty much everything was there except I could no longer use that installation of windows. I considered myself lucky to just lose windows rather than my data - raid is no replacement for backups.

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