Creating Raid 1 using existing drive and keeping data?

[Tygron]

So here's my idea. I bought another HDD, Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB. Exact same as my current drive. I was hoping I would be able to use these in a RAID 1 configuration but I don't want to have to reinstall everything nor do I have another drive or way to backup my current files. That is what I was hoping this RAID 1 would do. Have to drives in my system mirrored so if anything goes wrong, I have a backup and just buy another HDD to toss in there to replace the broken one and make the mirror again.
But searching the web doesn't really seem to be giving me any answers on how to do this.

In short. I have two drives that are the same, I have data on one I want to backup to the other. I want to use RAID 1 to do this. I don't want to loose anything in the process. How do?
I'm on Windows 7 64 Bit if that helps.

[RobbieThe1st]

Honestly, I'd not do that. Raid only protects against hardware failure, which is fairly rare these days. It doesn't protect against deletion(either accidental by you or by some program/script), Windows issues, corruption etc.
I would use a program like DriveImageXML to make a weekly backup of your Windows files. You might also want to use something like rsync(DeltaCopy seems to do the same thing on Windows) to keep your media library backed up.
Anything that needs to be backed up more frequently, say on a daily basis or more, use a service like SpiderOak (referral link, gives you extra free space) to backup your small but critical files.

[Tygron]

That does sound like a nice idea. But honestly my whole reasoning behind this was in case of hardware failure. I can't guarantee one or the other drive won't die which is why I thought having a direct mirror would be fine. I'm not looking for any size gain or speed gain. And chances are if I delete something I want it gone for good anyway. My only problem with scheduled backups is the possibility of something breaking before the backup happens. And having everything to sync constantly I would think would slow things down. I assumed Raid was different in that it was just simply doing it at the exact same time and not really thinking about it.

I'm more worried about drive failure now mostly because in the past few months i've had a friends laptop HDD go out, and then the new one died. Then Snow's hard drive was on its way out and I put a replacement drive in there (a WD Caviar Black 1TB that I was going to put in my system and this happened before I could) and the replacement drive died the next day. He heard it die with a loud nasty scrape. Hard drives can die whenever they feel like it, 2 years weeks days whatever. I wanna protect myself from that problem. Raid 1 just sounds like a good choice for that since I could loose a drive, switch over which one is the boot drive and keep going until I get a new drive to put in here and mirror again

[SirSlaughter]

You sir, have terrible luck with HDDs. I keep 2 HDDs in my PC. My 1TB Caviar black and a 320 GB drive for backup (It was originally in a laptop, but the laptop died). If there is something I need/want to save I always put it in my 2nd HDD. So I always have 2 copies. And then if I want to really really want to make sure I have it on hand, I put it into my 500GB external drive that I ripped from another laptop. So I have 3 different HDDs that keep my stuff. I don't know why I have so many backups, but I just find it fun to use them all. Now If I could only get my hands on that 1TB USB stick that was made not too long ago...

[avwolf]

To my knowledge, you can't pull an existing drive into a RAID like that unless it was already setup as part of a similar RAID. At least, I'd be really leery of it, because there's a lot of low-level magic that's done to keep the RAID working.

If you can't set up the RAID on new bare drives (that's what I did with my RAID 5, and getting Windows correctly migrated onto it was a nightmare, but that's mostly because it was a RAID 5. It's much easier on a RAID 1 or RAID 0.), then I'd suggest backing up all of your data somewhere before you try anything because I'd put money on it going away when you configure the RAID. Burn it to DVDs or push it all into Amazon S3 or Dropbox or Box.net or something, but make sure you have everything that you can't reinstall backed up. And don't be surprised if you have to reinstall Windows and restore from that backup.

[RobbieThe1st]

Well, while harddrives can fail at any time, it's usually on a bell curve - if it works fine for a week or two, it'll probably last for years.
I've run a raid for a while, and it's not exactly as good as it seems - for one thing, if the system doesn't get shut down properly, it'll have to resync the whole thing, checking to make sure that it's all the same on both drives. Takes hours, and slows things down a bit while doing so. Or, it might not(if your controller is crappy) and might have drives out of sync(!).
The best option would probably be to get two spare harddisks and backup every week, alternating drives. So, you have a backup from two weeks ago always.
I've also lost major data with a raid, due to software corruption/deletion. The raid was perfect(each drive had the same stuff), but the data was gone.

[Kit.]

nor do I have another drive or way to backup my current files. That is what I was hoping this RAID 1 would do.

It doesn't. Think of a RAID as a protection against downtime, not data loss. RAID is not meant to replace a proper backup.

Besides, RAID makes it harder to recover data lost due to other hardware failures (such as a failure of the RAID controller itself).

As to making the RAID1 from the existing drive without the need to backup... while I don't see anything that would make it theoretically impossible, I have never heard of any successful attempt in doing it under Windows or Linux. Besides, you will need to backup your data anyway, just in case something goes wrong during the conversion.

And chances are if I delete something I want it gone for good anyway.

Most data losses I've seen were caused by user errors.

[Tygron]

Alright. So, Robbie. Those programs you linked (hadn't looked at them quite yet), would they theoretically let me toss files to the other drive automatically whenever they change? Like say, I have a file saved from FL Studio and every time I make a change to it it saves an updated copy to the other drive? I'll admit i'm kinda lazy and I want things to just happen so I don't have to worry about it so much. I suppose I don't need a backup of everything on my computer. My pictures and music for sure and stuff from FL Studio I suppose. Other than that I probably don't need much else backed up, maybe some text files. As I said before I just always thought it would be more convenient for the RAID 1 since I could just pull the dead drive and keep going. That was my hope anyway, and until now that's how it sounded.

[aj]

I personally like bvckup for continuous backup to an external drive.

[RobbieThe1st]

Personally, I run Linux, and I use 'rsync' to backup my files. It checks each file in the source directory against the destination directory, and if they differ, updates the destination file as needed to make both copies match.
It's not perfectly efficient -- at least in it's default mode, Steam archive files get re-copied every time, even though only a few megs may have changed. Deltacopy is a port/wrapper of 'rsync', so it should allow the same thing. Bvckup, like aj said, looks to do the same thing as well, so it's a good option. Haven't used either, though, so I can't say anything about how well they work on Windows.