If you're not restoring you're not backing up

Windows Server has this neat feature: Storage Pools. In a nutshell it separates the logical storage from physical devices. I use it to make two physical hard drives appear as one logical disk. Anything saved to the pool is mirrored to both disks. In theory, this means that a failure of one physical drive won't loose any data since a copy is available on the second.

Last week I had a drive failure. It wasn't either of the drives in the storage pool. Instead the system drive (a third drive hosting the OS) had failed.

I think it took me 40 minutes to be up and running enough to validate the data was okay.

1. Install replacement system disk
2. Reinstall Windows Server 2012 R2
3. Reconnect two physical disks hosting the storage pool
4. Trawl the interwebs for details of how to reattached the storage pool

Job done (except for the reboots and updates and reboots and updates thing...).

One trick, Windows server doesn't automatically mount a newly attached pool on reboot. Here'e the PowerShell rune to chnage that:

Get-VirtualDisk | Where-Object {$_.IsManualAttach –eq $True} | Set-VirtualDisk –IsManualAttach $False