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Backup prior to W10

navychop

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Jul 20, 2005
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Northern VA
I am considering "upgrading" from W7 Pro to W10, perhaps in Oct or Nov. I have a RAID 1 in my PC using two 1TB HDDs. I will probably stick with 1TB. I use my PC much less often now, both due to time issues and that I get almost everything done on my 6+

To"clone" the drives in case of worst case scenario, I can:

-Pull one of the HDDs, set aside as the "insurance" and replace. Wait until new drive is mirrored.

-Buy cloning s/w or use freeware to a single HDD. Which?

The situation gets a little muddled by my considering using the opportunity to move to a RAID 5 array with 3 or 4 HDDs, hoping for some speed improvements, or RAID 10 with 4 HDDs.

Any suggestions? I am not a heavy or power user by any means. Never even got around to using the video editing s/w I got.
 
How about cloning to your new raid5 array, and then just upgrade the raid5 array while leaving the W7 mirrored drives as they are for the time being?
 
Buy an external USB 3.0 drive ($60) and image your current HDD RAID to it using Windows's built-in System Image tool.
Then once you are comfortable with Windows 10, you can erase that drive and use it for other backup or file-transfer purposes.