Win10 drive mirroring, hive mind experience

[Brad Johnson]

I have dual drives in my Win10-based home machine and have been using the Windows backup utility. It's... okay. It has some eccentrities, though, the most frustrating of which is it's propensity to reset random folder selections every time there's a major system update. I'm thinking about converting to straight drive mirroring for the simple redundancy with disk images on alternating portable drives every few weeks as the failsafe.  Do any of you reprobates have direct experience with Win10 drive mirroring? Suggestions? Thoughts?

Brad

[zxcvbob]

I have dual drives in my Win10-based home machine and have been using the Windows backup utility. It's... okay. It has some eccentrities, though, the most frustrating of which is it's propensity to reset random folder selections every time there's a major system update. I'm thinking about converting to straight drive mirroring for the simple redundancy with disk images on alternating portable drives every few weeks as the failsafe.  Do any of you reprobates have direct experience with Win10 drive mirroring? Suggestions? Thoughts?

Brad

I don't, but the guy across the hall from me at work was talking that last week.  He has two identical drives (they don't have to be identical) in a RAID 1 configuration.  What do you want me to ask him? :)

ETA: Here's an article I just found:  https://www.windowscentral.com/how-set-mirrored-volume-file-redundancy-windows-10#create_mirror_volume

I do have some recent experience with cloning disks using Clonezilla, but I haven't ventured into the advanced menu yet.

[cordex]

Some motherboards support a basic kind of hardware RAID. I used that for many years for my home PC and it saved me once.

I do not recommend Windows software RAID.

[Brad Johnson]

zxcv, mostly if it's stable and if it occasionally needs "resetting" due to a Windows update or some other flaky wierdness.

cordex, any particular reason? I can easily see Windows' internal handling of advanced RAID configurations being problematic, but simple drive mirroring has issues, too?

Brad

[cordex]

cordex, any particular reason? I can easily see Windows' internal handling of advanced RAID configurations being problematic, but simple drive mirroring has issues, too?

My problem with Windows-based software RAID is based on reliability and performance.  I've seen Windows software RAID fail hard more often even than the non-writeback cached motherboard or cheap-o RAID cards, and I've seen several cases where simple Windows mirrored volumes became unusably slow until the mirroring was disabled. 

It's possible they've improved since I last used it, though.

[lee n. field]

I have dual drives in my Win10-based home machine and have been using the Windows backup utility. It's... okay. It has some eccentrities, though, the most frustrating of which is it's propensity to reset random folder selections every time there's a major system update. I'm thinking about converting to straight drive mirroring for the simple redundancy with disk images on alternating portable drives every few weeks as the failsafe.  Do any of you reprobates have direct experience with Win10 drive mirroring? Suggestions? Thoughts?

Brad

Win 10 won't let you do software raid, like win 7 did.   So you have to work with whatever the manufacturer of the motherboard lets you do.  Which doesn't always work well and isn't always easy to work with.

For backup I like Veeam's free Endpoint Backup program.  You can do a bare metal recovery using it, as long as you have made the recovery cd image and have that available when you need it.

[Brad Johnson]

Okay, so no drive mirroring using native Win10 capabilities. Any suggestions for a simple, inexpensive hardware solution? I don't need bells and whistle. I just need it to work. One condition, I need to be able to take my current drives and simply plug them in. I don't have the time or patience to be migrating data.

Brad

[zxcvbob]

I thought you could still create a mirrored volume in W10 Disk Management (same thing as RAID 1).  I'll have to try it when I get home :D