Easiest way to make a windows system redundant?

[Fahd]

Hi folks,

I have a windows 8.1 system with 2 SSDs running SQL Server Express in addition to regular user applications like office and business accounting and pos software, etc. 1 ssd is the boot os drive and the other has client files as well as sql server data files and backups.

As you can probably tell this is a mom and pop store. And they have no backup systems or data redundancy.

The backup part is easy. Any cloud storage solution would be cost effective and fit the bill.

What would be the easiest way/solution to add some storage redundancy to their existing setup with minimal downtime? Is there some way I could add two more disks and just mirror the existing SSDs?

I would normally configure a raid controller with raid 1 mirrors before installing windows. In this situation I'm not sure how to proceed without disrupting the existing windows installation. Would like to mirror both the windows /boot os drive and the data drives.

Is windows storage spaces something to look into? Or is reinstalling windows the only way to go forward?

Thanks.

 

[marcoi]

might be good to list the specs of the hardware. Would be pointless to mention extra options then find out the hardware wouldnt support it.
For the mean time, probably suggest using an external HDD and cloning software to backup the drives as a just in case. That should be able to be done while running windows. Once done with the backup remove the hdd and store it in a safe.

 

[gea]

Several steps to improve availability

1. Backup of the whole system with disaster recovery ex Aomei what I use
2. Mirror system and data disk, may require a reinstall and hardware raid
3. Virtualise the server ex under ESXi (free), allows snapshots and easy recovery
4. Use a ZFS NAS to protect data (ESXi storage for VM and data)
with versioning to protect against data corruption and Ransomware
5. Use a HA Storage Cluster to allow a whole storage system failure
6. Use a standby failover system for fast service recovery
7. Use a HA Service Cluster to allow a failure of any server or server part

1-2 is doable without deeper knowledge
3-4 require some experience
5+ is datacenter technology

 

[Rand__]

How about adding the raid card, a mirrored/raid volume and then simply clone the OS drive over (or both drives to two raids, whatever your prefer )?
Should be doable with a boot cd or usb stick, little risk, quickly done and still got a failback option.

Driver support might be an issue depending on OS o/c

 

[BoredSysadmin]

Since this is ghetto "server" and desire to continue with ghetto solutions, then you could convert the partitions to dynamic and create mirrors for each disk (it would require 2 new SSDs for targets)
Couldn't find a guide for Windows 8.1, but this should be very similar as described here:
How to Mirror Boot Hard Drive on Windows 10 (Legacy or UEFI) - wintips.org - Windows Tips & How-tos