RAID 1 Existing drive Windows

[TomvB]

hi there guys, 

 

I want to improve the safety to prevent data loss by implementing RAID1 on my homeserver running windows 10. In there I am running two 3TB WD RED drives. (and a seperate ssd as OS Drive). One of the 3tb drives is full of data I do not want to lose. Therefore I want to mirror this drive. However all the guides I read on the web require empty drives before mirroring. Is there a way of mirroring in windows 10 without having two empty drives?

 

Greetings

 

Tom

[Oshino Shinobu]

If you want to prevent data loss, use one of the drives as a backup rather than going for RAID 1. Due to the nature of how RAID 1 works, if you get an issue with a load of data being corrupted by bad writes, you lose all the corrupted data. With a backup, you have a chance to restore the data to a point before corruption. RAID 1 also offers no protection against electrical surges, theft, fire etc. etc. as the drives are under the same conditions in the same place. 

 

Really, RAID 1 is for when you can't afford to have downtime and should be done once there is already a backup solution in place. 

 

Typically, it's not advised to set up RAID with drives that already have data on them, which is why they require formatting before they can be put in an array

[TomvB]

Oshino, Thanks for your response. I understand what you are saying. The reason why I would opt for RAID 1 is to prevent dataloss in case of drive failure. Fire, theft, electrical surges are ofcouse also a reason for data loss but not the one I am focussing on. I will look into a backupsystem. Would you reccomend using the standard Windows Backup or a software solution.