Mirror drive

[#1]

On my m$ home server I have 1.5tb of space spread across two drives. This automatically backs up to various other disks. Is it possible to mirror this to another external drive so that in the event of the server going down you could plug the external drive into your desktop and access your files or would an external slow the server down too much?

[#2]

Hi
I set up my back to do over night or during lunch breaks. You should not see any slow down in the performance but that depends on your configuration. Good idea would be to check performance monitor when the backup is running to see if there is any bottleneck.

[#3]

Plug in an external drive and set the software to back up your files to the external drive once a day or once a week, depending on your uses, after the initial setting up of the external drive, it won't slow it down at all as it would only be in use to back up the changed files.  What you may find though is that the software you use may not copy the files over in a readable format, it could create an image file which is a bit like an archive (so saves space) so just plugging it in wouldn't let you access the files anyhow, it's for data recovery, but you never know until you try.

[#4]

Try (hardware) RAID - consult Wikipedia first.

[#5]

Its not recommended to use RAID with the Windows Home Server.
You can plug in an external hard drive to the Windows Home Server and instead of adding it to the storage pool, you can use it to back up then what is stored on the home server.
Depending on how your WHS is set up the data could be mirrored across both drives.

[#6]

Quote from: Bud

Its not recommended to use RAID with the Windows Home Server.

Surely M$ are joking?
You aren't allowed to use a secure solution for your database on a server?

[#7]

"Secure" is not the right word.  More "resiilient" perhaps.
However, you need to understand the demographic that MS was looking for when the WHS idea was born. This isn't for a business or the hardcore techie. The idea is to have a "HOME" server so the marginally tech savvy consumer can have one central place to store data with a bit more functionality then a typical NAS and much less cost. WHS allows you to port old hardware in many cases thereby lowering the initial cost. As big drives really come down in price it makes the WHS product look better and better, and also grow larger and larger.
Keep in mind, WHS isn't the only solution available so I don't expect it to be the "perfect" choice, but it is a real good choice because it offers some key features such as:
Duplication of data.
10 user licenses for the console portion.
Access to shared data over a web browser.
A good amount of control over shares and folders.
The ability to swap or add drives as budget allows.
A Hardware raid is out of the budget that the WHS product is aimed at (and also much more difficult or costly to extend in size).  BIOS/motherboard raid setups are (often) not portable between machines, and will often not have true 'resilience'. (I've had a motherboard-raid system completely fail when one drive failed with timeouts).  Software raid is very portable, but not as fast as a true hardware raid.
Personally, in the situation described by the OP, I would use an external USB2/Firewire/eSATA drive and periodically sync the data across on a schedule.
B.

[#8]

Thanks for you input Barry, as I said before I have backups but what I want is a readily accessible copy ie. on and external drive that automatically syncs so that when the server falls over you can plug it in to a client machine. I already have this on an external drive but how would you automate the synchronization process. At the moment I use RD but days pass and I forget to keep it up to date.

[#9]

If the external drive is permanently plugged in, you can use a combination of XCOPY and the Task Scheduler to achieve what you want.
XCOPY is a command-line copy program included with Windows.  Alternatively you can look at successors of it called XXCOPY or ROBOCOPY which are freely downloadable.
B.