Windows 10: Back Up Windows 10 Storage Spaces Configuration

I will be upgrading a Windows 10 Pro computer to Windows 11 Pro. I will be replacing the existing system board with a new system board, processor and faster boot drive. I have an existing storage pool that uses parity. I will be reusing the physical drives in the pool. I want to know if I can back up the configuration of the pool itself and restore it to Windows 11 or if Windows 11 will recognize the pool after Windows 11 is installed and the drives are connected. I will back up the data in the pool before the upgrade, but it will be faster if Windows 11 recognizes the pool, or I can bac

:)

 

Storage Space and Space Pooling in x32Win10ProV20H2

Thank you very much for your reply.


You don't show a screenshot, so I am uncertain to which part of the process of creating a storage space you are referring. I pointed you to the tutorials. I now provide you with a screenshot of part of one of them, which shows a warning which might be what you are referring to.





Your question about double storage / redundancy appears to relate to the normal operation of storage spaces once configured, so seems obscure.

My impression is that few here have used storage spaces.

Note too the warning in
Create a New Pool and Storage Space in Windows 10

 

Storages Spaces Configuration

I've found a ton of info for Windows Server and often encountered that it applies to Windows 10 as well but there are several differences and there is a lot of the technical stuff that I'm having a hard time understanding. I just found two similar articles
that helped me:

• http://www.howtogeek.com/109380/how-to-use-windows-8s-storage-spaces-to-mirror-combine-drives/
• How to use Storage Spaces in Windows 10
• Another good article is at Storage Spaces explained: a great feature, when it works but it is a bit outdated.

I now have some success. I completed phase 1 of my drive testing and shut my system down. While it was down I removed the LSI card with the five drives and then booted my system. Now I can create a Storage Space on the three drives I freed up that are directly
connected to my MB. At this time I don't know if the LSI card was the reason I could not previously create the storage space. However I think I'm on the way.

I was just watching a video about Storage Spaces and the speaker stated that if you have either software or hardware RAID on the PC then you will encounter issues with Storage Spaces. At this time I'm assuming that this is why I could not create the Storage
Space with the LSI card installed. If I could get into the BIOS of the card (previous attempts failed and I need to contact LSI and see if they can help) and turn off the RAID function and hopefully use it just as a controller card WITHOUT the RAID then it
should work.

I just encountered a failure. Following is my setup using three drives (1-3TB, 1-4TB, 1-6TB)





Following is my failure, in the above image I had clicked the "Create storage space" button, a window pops up "Creating storage space" and quickly changes to "Formatting Storage space" for about 10-20 seconds, then changes to "Deleting Storage space" and
then to "Can't delete the storage space". I'm tired and I'm giving up for tonight.





Ops forgot to mention. I was able to create a mirror but not a three way mirror or not the Parity (this is what I want).

 

Storages Spaces Configuration

Progress Update

I’ve had success but it has not been without a lot of pain and time.

Major issues for me.

• With my first attempts I was NOT able to create a Storage Space. As I research the issue I discovered one post that stated I could NOT have either a software or hardware RAID on the same system. At this time I did have the “LSI SAS9211-8I 8 Port” card installed.
  I’ve discovered that the card was set as a RAID card. At that time I was NOT able to get into the card BIOS and change any of the settings or software, thus I removed the card.
• After removing the card I was able to create the Storage Space but this was not without discover of another issue. I wanted to use Parity which is like RAID 5 and I also wanted to use the ReFS file format. Initially because of my choices (Parity and ReFS)
  I could NOT create the Storage Space and discovered that MS does not support this combination but in the setup they allow you to select Parity and ReFS To resolve the issue I picked Parity and NTFS, this allowed me to create the Storage Space.
• Another challenge was setting the value for maximum size for the storage space. As I understand it is best to establish a huge max size thus as you add more disk you do not hit the max size limit. If you hit the max size limit then it will be necessary
  to create a new storage space with a huge max size, move the contents of the first storage space to the new storage space. This would be super time consuming and require a lot of hard drives as temp holding space. After many attempts I settled on a max size
  of 50TB and with the three drives, 1-3TB, 1-4TB, 1-6TB, I had a space with 11.8TB and a max size of 50TB. This should be more than enough space for my data for the living years I have left remaining.
  
  
  
  

Thus I finally had a workable storage space and my next step was to copy my “data” files to the new storage space so I kicked off all the necessary copy actions to copy the data. I used the high-level folder as my starting point. Following are two images
showing the action. As you can see some have completed and some have a VERY long time remaining, e.g. 1913 minutes = 231 hours or about 10 days. I realize that all the copy actions are using the same drives thus this is a performance hit but it is a lot faster
than me running one copy at a time thus forcing me to start another copy when one completed. But the actual performance hit is less than the time I would lose by the time gap between a copy finishing and me starting another copy. However there does seem to
be a huge performance overhead with Storage Spaces. Originally I had to move the contents of the three drives in the Storage Space and if I recall this was completed in less than 4 days.









After the copy to the storage space completes I see the following as the next steps.

• Share the storage space with full privileges so all my other PCs can access the drives. This is quick task and should take less than 10 minutes.
• Test to ensure all PCs can access the storage space. This is a bit more time and should take 1-2 hours.
• Change ALL applications on ALL PCs to use the new storage space and confirm that all is working correctly. This could easily take a couple of days.
• Use Hard Disk Sentinel (HDS) to reinitialize disk surface. This is an extensive test and will take about four days to test both drives being freed up, e.g. the 4TB and 6TB that currently have my data on them.
• The HDS 4TB drive test will finish at least a day or two before the 6TB completes, when it does I could add it to the existing Storage pool or just wait until the 6TB HDS completes and add it to the storage pool. If I wait for the 6TB drive this would give
  me a bit over 17TB for my data. I feel that this will be more than enough to last me for whatever years I have left.

At the same time I’m doing the above I can also work on the LSI SAS9211-8I 8 Port card and get it working, this will be for all of my backups. I have contacted LSI support via email and they did send information. Some of the info I was able to implement
and others presented a problem for me. I sent a follow-up email last night but most likely will not get an answer until Monday. I was expecting a reply but so far no reply.

After I get the card working I can create another parity storage space for all of my backups. Currently I have five drives connected to the card, 2-1TB drives, 1-1.5TB drive, 2-2TB drives.

After I create the backup storage space, setup full permissions so all systems can access and confirm the access, the following steps will be performed. These will take several days or weeks.

• Copy data from one backup drive. I currently have as backup drives, 2-2TB, 7-3TB, 3-6TB, to the temp drives attached to the card. I will start with a 3TB drive. By starting with a 3TB drive this will ensure I can replace one of the 1TB drives without space
  issues on the storage space. When I complete the backup storage space build it will have the 3-6TB drives and 2 or 3 3TB drives assigned to the space. This will provide between 23-26TB of storage for backups. If I need more space I can purchase a 10TB drive
  and replace one of the 3TB drives. Thus I’m playing a lot of musical chairs to get to the final build.
• Confirm that all the backup data has been removed from the drive to the backup storage space
• Change the necessary applications to use the backup storage space.
• Confirm that apps are successfully using the backup storage space.
• After the copy completes run the HDS test on the old drive. BTW the test level I’m using wipes out any data on the disk

After the HDS test completes remove the smallest drive from the backup storage space and add the drive that just completed the HDS test