Windows 10: Storage Space - Killed USB external drives 2x mirrored

Summary : Looks like Storage Space can kill your USB hard drives but its recoverable without additional tools. Suspect it looks like death by partition table corruption or some other low level corruption. Plus a good idea to test your understanding of the process before relying upon. [Win10 2004]


Recently been testing to see how robust File History is a backup app for my laptop using two identical external USB3 hard drives setup as a Storage Space 2-way mirror. After backing up manually couple of times the mirrored drives all looked good. Then tested the mirror by simulating a failed drive by:


1. Physically disconnecting one of the drives and attempting to remove it from Storage Space configuration.

That resulted in what appeared to be completely dead USB drive. I could connect the drive and powered it up, the OS saw it as a USB Mass Storage Device and as a Disk Drive but anything to do volume management, trouble shooting drives was useless. Tried a couple of well known disk recovery apps - one saw the drive as a corrupt/hidden partition, the other saw it as dead as well. Remove it from the configuration wasn't that successful it seemed to hang around.


2. The remaining Storage Space doesn't make sense using a single drive so tested to see what happened if the remaining drive was deleted like the previous. The results were just like the previous, another dead drive.


3. Eventually manged to remove them from the Storage Space configuration and when done they automagically reappeared as unallocated drives. They were formatted and setup as Storage Space again all good.


Also File Histroy as a backup - problems is another issue

:)

 

Storage Spaces Mirror 2 Drives?

I came here looking for information on Storage Spaces for dynamically mirroring my data drive. The original question and scenario presented by RPmtl is both understandable and reasonable yet some experts here are drifting off on viruses, ransomware, imaging and third party software, as if they are not paying attention to the question. My search brought me here because I use the exact same backup strategy as RPmtl, down to the physical drive configuration. And dynamic backups (or at least quick/often backups) internally to compliment full backups on external media done at longer intervals (weeks or months). I also had the exact same question, can a Storage Spaces' mirrored drive be used independently if necessary. The answer was a simple "no". Thanks to the person who actually understood the question and answered it without fluff and unrelated info.

I realized this thread is a year old but for RPmtl, if you happen to read this and still looking for a solution, here's what I have been doing successfully for years. It's not dynamic mirroring, such as RAID, but it's as close as you can get without buying fancy software. RoboCopy is included in Windows 10. I use a RoboCopy script/batch file to mirror the contents of one internal drive to another internal drive of the same capacity and I can run it on-the-fly or as a daily scheduled task. It compares files and dates, only copying what's new or changed, making the process for a TeraByte's worth of data super quick. I use a separate script for full backups (also mirrored and quick) to an external drive, that I lock away in a safe. The files on these backup/mirrored drives are accessible anywhere and the drives can be read on any PC.

 

i wanted to mirror two drives with storage spaces. all my data is gone.

please help me

i have an external drive and a second internal drive. i wanted to mirror them and read that storage spaces was the answer. i thought storage spaces was for mirroring drives. i clicked both drives and now all my data from both drives is gone. windows dosent
see either drive or any of my files. i have 10 years of pictures i was trying to backup that are gone. is there any way to get my files back?

 

Storage Spaces Mirror 2 Drives?

Actually... no. If you plug out a mirror from a Storage Spaces mirror and plug into another Windows 10 machine, it will first warn you that a Storage Space is in trouble, but seconds later your plugged mirror is fully available. I just tried.
Interesting enough, you can keep working and modifying your now "reduced resiliency" space. When you plug the missing drive back to your real Storage Spaces machine it gets in sync and back to normal.

I came here looking for some more experienced users having tried this before, but I see that it's a bit crazy and no one has tried it. So far, I'm starting to believe this is a great way to have an always updated roaming media storage.
I wonder what would happen if the roaming media gets modified, it would be overwritten once back in the mirror?