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I am currently using an internal hard drive to store my backups created by the Windows Server 2012 Microsoft backup. The backup drive is configured as a raid 5.

In the event windows crashes or something happens to the operating system that prevents me from booting normally, will the Microsoft backup software give me the option to restore from this drive?

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A backup is not complete until the restore is tested. Nobody can answer this question for you. You must do it.

  1. Pull out the OS drive
  2. Put in a new blank drive
  3. Follow your restore procedure

If you have trouble doing this you should consider buying a backup and restore product that supports bare metal restore.

NOTE: You should keep your backups on an external system and test the restores on a test PC or VM. What would you do if something happened to that computer? It contains all the backups of itself. (Single point of failure)

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  • Hello, got that. Will do a restore test. Also Our IT department by mistake ordered a wd my cloud drive. Which is not supported by windows as image backup for our data is around 400 GB. It cannot be backed up over network. We will have to buy a NAS specially for this purpose.
    – Sab.M
    Commented Nov 20, 2017 at 7:21
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Any kind of RAID (>0) provides redundant fail-over for hard disk failure only - it's no backup. When the operation system is damaged the array will not help you in any way.

You may be looking for disaster recovery which very often is accomplished by image backup.

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  • Hello, the raid array used is for back up only, just that the array is inside the same server. But physically separate from os installed array
    – Sab.M
    Commented Nov 20, 2017 at 7:28
  • @Sab.M I'd rethink this as well - when the server is inoperable there's no way to get to the backup. Additionally, ransom malware encrypts all data it can find - you should make your backup independent of your primary location and restrict access to it.
    – Zac67
    Commented Nov 20, 2017 at 11:56
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As long as you have your setup disc, you should be able to boot from that and use the recovery tools on the disc to recover from whatever backup media you chose to save your backups.

But only as long as you did not use a software raid on this internal disk you are using. If you are using a hardware raid you should be fine, but a software raid might be storing the raid information with the operating system and that pretty much defeats the purpose of your backups.

Go here for more information on restoring with Windows backup.

I'd also suggest building a dummy server, make a backup, and then perform the restore so you become familiar with the entire procedure.

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  • Hello, We are using a server RAID M1115 SAS/SATA controller. There are 2 arrays of 3 disks each. 2.5 " sata 300 GB. configured in RAID 5. Now the first array has operating system and the second array is dedicated for windows complete image backup. So the question is if the first array fails. Will i be able to recover windows from the second array during reinstallation of windows server 2012
    – Sab.M
    Commented Nov 20, 2017 at 7:26
  • @Sab.M Since you are using a hardware raid, you should be fine. Just be aware this is not good practice for making backups. A couple USB drives rotated out daily would be more efficient than trying to use internal storage. They are not that expensive these days. If this were my server, I'd pick up a couple USB 3.0 drives (name branded) and reallocate the internal storage for something more useful. But again, please run the experiment. You don't even need a windows license to build a temp server. Raided or not, you can test to see how the process will flow. That is what's most important.
    – Bill
    Commented Nov 20, 2017 at 14:13

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