How to Backup RAID 0 and Raid 1 Virtual Disk/Partition in a Safe and Easy Way

What is RAID 0 and RAID 1

RAID 0 - Data striping without redundancy (no protection). Optimized for Performance. RAID 0 uses striping to write data across multiple drives simultaneously. This means that when you write a 5GB file across 5 drives, 1GB of data is written to each drive. Parallel reading of data from multiple drives can have a significant positive impact on performance.

The trade-off with RAID 0 is that if one of those drives fails, all of your data is lost and you must restore from a backup image.

RAID 0 is an excellent choice for cache servers, where the actual data being stored is of little value, but performance is very important.

• Minimum number of drives: 2
• Strengths: Highest performance.
• Weaknesses: No data protection; One drive fails, all data is lost.

RAID 1 - Disk mirroring. Optimized for Redundancy

RAID 1 uses mirroring to write data to multiple drives. This means that when you write a file, the file is actually written to two disks. If one of the disks fails, you can simply replace it and rebuild the mirror. The tradeoff with RAID 1 is cost. With RAID 1, you must purchase double the amount of storage space that your data requires.

• Minimum number of drives: 2
• Strengths: Very high performance; Very high data protection; Very minimal penalty for write performance.
• Weaknesses: High redundancy cost overhead; Because all data is duplicated, twice the storage capacity is required.

Why do Windows users need to backup RAID 0 or RAID 1 drives

Some people were puzzled by the disk mirror function of RAID 1 and think it is safe enough to protect the operating system and the data, so they may ignore backing up. In fact, only when one hard disk has a physical failure, you can still boot your computer and replace the faulty hard disk, but if you encountered a virus, system crash, application conflict as well as "software" related problem, RAID 1 redundancy is useless. It is a good habit to back up the system and the applications on your RAID, whenever there is an error, you can simply restore the system to the prior state.

Many computer users have the experience of the system crash or data loss, for example, hardware conflict, bad ram, hard disk drives overload, viruses attack, software conflict, etc. If your system is crashed and then you will realize that you really need backup software after suffering the great pain to sacrifice your precious weekends or dating time to reinstall your operating system. 

Due to the distinguishing feature of RAID 0 and RAID 1 that if one of those drives fails, all of your data is lost, it is a huge risk, so you have to backup RAID 0 drive. To RAID users, there are two questions they may ask, "Does the software compatible with RAID?" "Is it easy, safe and fast to backup RAID 0 or RAID 1 drive?" The answer is yes and EaseUS server backup software is a great solution to backup RAID 0.

You can save the image archive to local hard disk, tape, LAN computer disk or CD/DVD. Besides backing up to an image archive, you may also clone the virtual disk to replace or upgrade the old one by this RAID backup software.