Win 7 Backup & Restore RE: Dynamic Disks

rufio

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 4, 2003
Messages
1,367
My HTPC is running a 128gb SSD for the boot drive and has two 3tb drives in a dynamic software mirrored raid that hold all of my data.

My intention is to have backup and restore make system images of the HTPC C:\ (SSD) drive and store them on the 3tb mirror. I also want to save images from my desktop and laptop to the same 3tb mirror (via network drive).

I set backup and restore on the HTPC and it appears to have made a ~19gb image of the SSD. This is the correct current used space, I can see the folder on the 3tb mirror it is saved in and found a VHD file that is the right size. However, after doing so I noticed a warning in the settings about dynamic disks.

Code:
When restoring a system image from this volume, the disks on your computer cannot be formatted to match the layout of the disks in the backup.  To have full restore functionality, select a volume on a basic disk as your backup location.

WTF? :confused: Does this mean that I won't be able to restore from this image if it is on the mirror? Could restoring from this image break the mirror or cause data loss? I recently cloned to this same SSD from the old spinner that was in the machine (using ghost) and there were no issues with my 3tb mirror, why would this way of imaging the drive be any different?
 
not sure if this helps, but i was doing some research on 3tb drives, and apparently Windows 7 backup is/was having issues properly backing up with 3tb drives. something about 4096 vs 512 byte sector sizes.
 
Interesting. As far as I can tell, the backup from the 128gb SSD to the 3tb array went fine. I don't know if there is a verify backup feature though. I might see if I can mount the VHD in vmware, though that does not help me figure out the possible dynamic drive issue.
 
I read this while doing some research:

"Dynamic storage can scatter pieces of files across several disks, which means that many conventional disk imaging tools that read blocks off the disk sequentially won't capture a usable image."

Sounds to me like Windows writes the data in some kind of raw format for a dynamic setup that destroys the integrity of the image format. Here's a link that might have some useful info:

http://www.windowspcguy.net/?p=233

I'm not certain about any of this, though, so read up carefully. There does seem to be a fairly well-known issue with restoring an image from a dynamic setup, so that is verified - but I'm not at all sure how this pertains to a dynamic RAID 1 setup.
 
Back
Top