Windows 10 Storage Spaces

Has anyone any experience of using "Storage Spaces" on a Win10 PC?

I was wondering if I could use this to simplify my digital image backup method. Currently I use Free File Synch to back up across both internal and external (USB3) disks. I had previously considered setting up Raid but never got round to doing so.

My current drives are as follows:-

C: Samsung SSD (255GB) with programs only, i.e. no user data.
D: Samsung SSD (255GB) this has my Lightroom catalog, previews etc on it and a Back up of Win 10.
E: 1TB Seagate spinning disk (7200rpm) used for User Data storage.
F: 4TB Toshiba spinning disk (7200rpm) used as my current images and archived images.
G: 1TB Seagate spinning disk (7200rpm) currently spare.
I: 2 TB Toshiba spinning disk (7200rpm) currently spare.
K to R: Seagate 5TB external USB3 drive with five partitions (4 x 1TB and 1 561 GB)

The external partitions on the 5TB external drive are as follows:-

K: has a back up of some data from Drive F.
O: has a back up of some data from Drive F.
P: Is currently a spare partition.
Q: has a back up of some of the data from Drive F.
R: Is used for Widows Back ups and includes a Windows image back up.

I'm expecting a 5TB SATA drive and had intended to use this as my primary back up drive for the data from drives E and F. To then allow me to use the 5TB external drive as the back up for the new 5TB drive. As I see the current use of the external drive partitions as a bit of a risk. This does mean that I will have to shuffle data around, a job for the dark nights I think.

I would be grateful for any suggestions on how best to simplify the current arrangements to give a more resilient solution.

I agree with C and D and have similar myself.

Is there any reason you do not have all your data and photos on a single drive, each with its own single high level directory root.

Simplify the other drives to be backup 1 and backup 2.

Use Sync to backup your data and catalog.
Use an appropriate tool to back up your Windows drive to the SSD. (Also keep a recovery fob).

I have all my data on a P drive (photos and data), my catalog on a G drive.
I use Macrium Reflect to backup my system drive every morning automatically at 6 am.
Shortly afterwards I have GoodSync my data (incl catalog) from my P drive to a connected Q drive.

I get 2 emails around 6.15 to tell my my O/S and data are fully backup up. Only one morning in several years did I get a message to say that a backup did not complete.

Every so often I do another backup to an external drive.

Let me speak to the question itself, and not to the rather involved drive arrangement.

I have been using storage spaces for a couple years for my main PC (which is also my main photo editing PC). They work very well. Before I went live, I simulated numerous failure modes by pulling drives, and once a failure mode without simulation (with a bad motherboard), and it performed flawlessly.

I used NTFS. THey support (or did, or soon will not) ReFS as well, but after a lot of experimentation I decided it was not ready for real use (insert a lot of details here, ask if interested, but also now Microsoft is limiting ReFS to Windows 10 WS only).

There are two main issues with storage spaces: The GUI in Windows 10 is incomplete (or it was, have not followed lately). Doing many things required powershell. Powershell is not that hard, lots of tutorials, but it does add a significant complexity to get certain features (I can't recall exactly which, I want to say certain numbers of columns).

The second is that it is very conservative in what it will attempt to do, there is almost no dynamic changes allowed. What this means, usually, is if you outgrow your space, you add a LOT of drives (often it means doubling the number) to add space, you can't reconfigure (using old school terms, you could not convert Raid 0+1 to Raid 5 to save space). You have to unload, initialize and start over. That's good as what they do is extremely reliable; but it is also painful on home systems where odd size drives and space constraints are frequent.

Here's a useful link, where the answer contains a lot of other useful links.

I've now got two pools running, a (old school terms again) raid 0+1 I use for Photos, and a separate server with Raid 5 type setup for security camera videos. Not a hint of issues with either one.

As to your setup and what to do, I guess it's a question of what problem you are trying to solve. To me you have woefully too few backups, and too scattered. I'd buy some more big EHD's and have 2-3 external backups that are not fragmented (and real backups, not syncs), and I'd think about getting a couple more 4TB drives, throwing away the 1 and 2TB drives, build a raid-5 set with the 3x4TB giving you about 8TB (whether storage spaces or just software raid), and have C, D, and new X = big drive. That gives some redundancy on the really large storage (the bigger the more likely to fail, in one sense, so some easier recovery). But I'd start with a better backup setup.

But that's spending a fair amount of money. But honestly, with that setup, if it was me, I would make a mistake one day juggling where data is and at beast fail to back something up, at worst erase or overwrite live data. Too complicated. Simplicity is the companion of reliability when it comes to human/computer interaction.

ST-EOS said:

Has anyone any experience of using "Storage Spaces" on a Win10 PC?

I was wondering if I could use this to simplify my digital image backup method. Currently I use Free File Synch to back up across both internal and external (USB3) disks. I had previously considered setting up Raid but never got round to doing so.


I would be grateful for any suggestions on how best to simplify the current arrangements to give a more resilient solution.

Click to expand...

Like others, I would suggest a simplified arrangement of drive letters. I have no experience with Storage Spaces, so I can't comment on that. However, I just purchased a 6 TB HGST drive here HGST DeskStar NAS 3.5" 6TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s High-Performance Hard Drive for Desktop NAS Systems Retail Packaging 0S04007 - Newegg.com. $188 with free shipping. Sales tax only if you live in California.

You have a lot of Seagate drives, which rank worst in reliability among the major drive manufacturers. Go to www.backblaze.com and look for their drive reliability reports. If you do want to continue using the Seagate drives, get a utility that monitors drive health. ("SMART")

Phil Burton

Thank you gentlemen for responding to my question. I shall study them and hopefully from your replies be able to create a simplified arrangement of disks with a more robust back up routine. Like most computer users I suspect my system has grown in terms of capacity. But with no real thought on how best to deploy a reliable and storage/backup methodology.
Thanks again gentlemen.

ST-EOS said:

Like most computer users I suspect my system has grown in terms of capacity. But with no real thought on how best to deploy a reliable and storage/backup methodology.

Click to expand...

The problem with home systems (and I am guilty, oh so guilty) is we often try to keep modifying what we have, expanding, adding and reusing. We then end up something something so messy that if you woke up and looked at it with fresh eyes you would wonder "who did that". In many ways it is the height of "penny wise, pound foolish", especially considering what we have tied up in cameras, not to mention investment in our time to produce images.

My own two cents are this: You want something that is simple to understand, which is as automated as practical in keeping with your workflow, and has good backups.

No matter the genius of the operator (and maybe exacerbated by genius), the human is the least reliable part of any computer system. Backup should involve no more than plugging in a cable and pushing a button, and no action at all should be required for backing up incremental additions (i.e. as you create new image folders). Getting images from camera to disk should be no more complex.

Sure, there are many who have so many images that external, hierarchical storage is needed (some online, some offline, because it won't all fit online). But for most of us, even prolific photographers, the cost of storage falls as fast as we take images, and the simple solution is "buy enough storage to keep it all online" combined with "buy enough offline storage to keep a couple of backups".

(Culling helps with this - who wants to leave 2,812 relatively mediocre images of an Egret to their heirs).

Beyond that:

- In-box raid (or raid-like) redundancy is nice, but rarely comes into play. It is more important for very large drives than small. It is not worth having if you don't know how it works and how to swap a failed drive. It is not a backup. Given a choice between raid and backup, always always choose backup. Not saying raid is bad; I like it and use it. Just it's not the be-all, end-all solution.

- Sync's are not backups (unless they are). A backup must maintain point-in-time version history to really be a backup, otherwise all you end up with for many types of failures are copies of the corrupt file carefully preserved on backups, but no good copies. Some sync programs (e.g. Goodsync) also do good backups, many (most) do not.

- Backups should mostly be offline; many kinds of failures (think ransomware) can affect every drive online. Power surges (e.g. lightning) can affect every drive online. Ideally at least one backup should be off-site (think burglary, fire or flood).

- Backups should be tested. Every few months, pick a random file (an old image, a very recent image, a tax file, an email file, whatever - mix it up) and see if you can recover a copy of it from your backup.

- Big, fancy multi-use, home-cloud type boxes can be useful, but are often more complex than they are worth, and a lot of them are "me too" variations that are junk and fail. Do a lot of research before investing in one. Big disks inside your home computer, in a nice big tower with lots of cooling and room, is often the simplest and cheapest solution, and can be more reliable if done carefully. The KISS principle certainly applies.

PhilBurton said:

...get a utility that monitors drive health. ("SMART")

Click to expand...

Actually always a good idea.

Thanks again Linwood for the additional information, much appreciated.