Backing up raid o

I have two 74g raptors in raid o.
Can I buy a external hard drive & mirror the drives?
Could I boot to the external drive & transfer everything back to another drive if I would ever half to?
I have a ASus A8V Deluxe Motherboard.

Buy an external drive and mirror? I'm not sure what you're thinking of doing but i suggest doing one of 2 things.

1) Buy another hard drive and just copy everything over to it whenever you feel it needs to be backed up.

2) Buy another internal harddrive and use Windows backup utility and setup a schedule that it can back up say every friday.

Up to you, hope this helps. I'm not clear on why you would want to mirror another drive because RAID0 is only as fast as the slowest drive, and it will only be as fast as a single drive(if a single is mirrored) so it defeats the point of even running RAID0.

Edit.. hmm i reread that. I'm not 100% sure. It probably wouldn't allow you to copy because the files from windows would be in use. I'm sure someone with lots of windows knowledge knows because one day this will be an issue for me too

a raid-0+1 (striped-mirror) array, would need to consist of 4 74gb raptors(or any 4 or more of the same HDD's). What you could do is get a 150gb or larger Hdd and use the backup utility of your choice.

You could get one and use a program like Ghost or Acronis to back it up and only reconnect during backup or reimaging.

Thanks for the replies.
What I would like to do is backup everything I have now so if the raid fails I could just replace the drives & not have to reinstall the windows.
I dont know if that is possible with a external hard drive.

okay the thing is, he(and me) need an imaging program that will work with RAID0. AFAIK i asked before and no one was sure if it worked with RAID. So... do you know of any image programs that will run with raid?

By this i mean it will prompt for raid drivers when im installing the image so that i can use 2x74gb raptors again instead of the regular single drive setup.

Thats what images are for, will prevent you from reinstalling everything and just a simple copy back onto the computer and everything is back. however im unsure of any that work with raid,cause i need one too.

Sounds like you & I are looking for the same thing.
You just explained it better.

Ghost works with most raid. I have used it a long time. So far I know it works with; NV southbridge raid, Giga raid Silicon Image 0680, 3112 (most likely all SI), Acard raid,Highpoint.

There was a problem with older versions, not that they did not have dos drivers but that it used a 98 boot disk to access in dos. I was unaware of this because I got a version without a boot disk and used pc dos with it. At that time I was the only one who could backup arrays that were NTFS based. I also found by mistake that some sata arrays were not recocnized but could be by enabling the ~fni switch.

Like someone has stated, I have also had problems with my older version of Ghost and RAID 0, I have read that Acronis works fine for RAID 0. I will be using it when I put my RAID 0 back together in the next few weeks. For daily backups I use Backup Magic. It is very simple to use, and all I do is double click on my backup shortcut on my desktop and it backups everything I have added or changed since my last backup (onto my spare 7200 drive). I just run it everyday or two when I do my scans (it takes like 5-10 seconds max). When you build your backup, you select the exact folders or files you want in that backup set. Currently if I drop a drive or crash my OS, I just image my last install (ten minutes), and then replace my backed up folders. I even have my outlook files and mozilla bookmarks getting backed up. Hope this helps.
Bandit

shadowdr said:

Ghost works with most raid. I have used it a long time. So far I know it works with; NV southbridge raid, Giga raid Silicon Image 0680, 3112 (most likely all SI), Acard raid,Highpoint.

There was a problem with older versions, not that they did not have dos drivers but that it used a 98 boot disk to access in dos. I was unaware of this because I got a version without a boot disk and used pc dos with it. At that time I was the only one who could backup arrays that were NTFS based. I also found by mistake that some sata arrays were not recocnized but could be by enabling the ~fni switch.

Click to expand...

oh sweet sweet, i better get on that then lol

I have succesfully mirrored the raid array using the wd utility.
I mirrored it to a wd ide drive.
But when the raid array was broken one time I could not succesfully mirror from the ide drive to the raid.
That is why I was wondering if I could boot from a mirrored external drive .