Hello, Pardon my ignorance in the following questions. Some of the answers seem to be in the marketing materials provided by Storagecraft, but I'm looking for some confirmation from end users. I have a Dell server with a 205Gb SCSI RAID (5) volume, it is split into 2 partitions, C: & D:. The system is on C: and all other data is on D:, including exchange. I need more space on the D: partition, so I'm planning on installing a new SATA RAID 5 array. Can I use SP to image the existing partitions to an eSATA drive, then restore to the new SATA RAID? I don't have the physical space or power to have both RAID's running in parallel. So, I'll have to install the new SATA controller card into the existing system, then image, then pull the SCSI RAID controller and drives, install the SATA drives, create the new array, then restore. This seems like a reasonable plan, but knowing the little I know of Windows systems it seems much to simple. Second question - if the change of drives goes according to plan, I then need to backup my new increased capacity. How much will SP function like NTBackup? Will it clear the Exchange system logs after a successful backup? Can I schedule it to make full/differential backups to different eSATA drives based on alternating week schedules? Thanks to anyone who will play the pre-sales role and answer all or some of my questions. Randy

You may image your partitions also to USB or Firewire external hard disk. You reconstruct your array with bigger hard disks ,partition them and restore.

Imaging is not backup so I don't thinkt SC will clear exchange logs.If you leave enogh free space in the new drives you may want to schedule exch back on disk before the scheduled backup (full or other) but is not needed.

If you want to use more than one external with incremental /differential I suggest to use robocopy.exe for duplicating the external drive

Your plan will work like a dream - insert the new SATA RAID Controller - reboot and add the driver - CHECK that the Exchange VSS writer is enabled - then image to the external ESata drive - shut down and reboot to the recovery enviroment - restore the "C:" drive as per normal EXCEPT select the option to use an orginal XP MBR - restore the "D:" drive useing all the aviable disk space - will work well

Your next question is Exchange - as long as the Exhange VSS writer is enabled (this is not enabled on an SBS server - search on Google on how to turn it on) ShadowProtct will BACKUP the Exchange databases and truncate the log files as expected. Remember SP is a very accurate backup program just deal with Windows correctly and you wont have an issue.

Your final question about alternating weekly schedules  - my recomendation is a FIXED (could be a ESATA drive that never gets removed from the server) should be used as the repository for all images based on a weekly schedule with a retention period set by you, then using other removable drives use a robocopy script as a Post Backup Command to copy from the fixed disk to the removable disk and end up with an exact copy of the fixed - this would be the script i would use "robocopy.exe F:\data R:\data /COPY:DAT /E /V /PURGE /ZB"  where "F:\data" refers to the source (Fixed disk) data and "R:\data" refers to the denistation (Removable Disk) data, note the purge switch which deletes all old data to ensure that the removable disk is a true replica of the fixed disk - when you down load RoboCopy copy it into the System32 directory for faultless operation.