Hello,

Can I use ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1 to make a backup image of my computer's RAID JBOD hard drives, 1.4 TB size ("JBOD = just a bunch of drives", two in this case) to an external drive (configured as RAID 0,  2 TB size, FireWire interface) and then restore it to my computer's new hard drive configuration of RAID 0+1 (4 hard drives, mirror of striped RAIDS, 1.4 TB) and have it work...?

I'd sure appreciate some feed back on this.  I had a hard drive fail in my RAID 0 configuration and when rebuilding everything I accidentally created a JBOD RAID.  It took two days to reinstall the VIsta OS, drivers, software, updates, etc. and I really don't want to have to do it again.  It would be great if I could use ShadowProtect Desktop to migrate my existing software load to the RAID 0+1 configuration.  Then I'll use it to manage my computer backups so I never have to perform a fresh reload of all the software because of a hard drive failure.

 Thanks,

ValinHawK

I am curious, too:  can ShadowProtect Desktop work properly with RAID 1+0?

Comments from StorageCraft?

Thank you.

I've determined that the answer is YES. 

Well, I never heard from Storagecraft or anyone on this so I just bought extra hard drives as insurance in case it didn't work.  I took out my drives with all my software installed, and put in the fresh new drives set up in the RAID 0+1 configuration.  I was able to successfuly restore my software load/drive image to the new RAID 0+1 configuration with no problems.  I expected that would be the case since the OS (Vista Home Premium in the case) and RAID controllers would handle the RAID management transparent to the ShadowProtect Desktop.  I hope this helps anyone wondering if there would be any problems with this.  It ends up being a good way to reconfigure if your OS and RAID management software doesn't support migrating between configurations -- which was my case with NVIDIA's MediaShield Software.  It couldn't migrate from a JBOD RAID (Just A Bunch of Disk) to any other RAID configuration. 

Valin

One note, we ran into a system the other day where the RAID driver was different depending on the RAID configuration.  The company was migrating from a RAID 1 (Mirroring) to a RAID 5.  The system failed to boot because the system boot driver had changed.  In this case we simply ran the HIR function after the restore and it installed the proper RAID 5 boot driver.

Can I add my two cents? :^}  I've had no problem backing up or restoring RAID's.  I use Adaptec SCSI and onboard Intel SATA RAIDS.  No problems with the backup to external USB HDD or restores from the WinPE recovery disk.  RAID configurations are RAID1 and RAID5.