I'm currently backing up a server and the data on the shares it hosts to a single 8TB drive (its not the only backup copy). Because of the single drive dependency, running low on capacity and 8TB being the maximum size currently commercially available for the general market as a single drive, I was going to run 4x USB 3 drives to create a pool as a parity storage space and continue backing up data to that, to provide more capacity and a little bit of redundancy.
My question is does the Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials Server Backup component support this? I've never tried a server backup with anything but a single drive before. Because this is the 2012 R2 Essentials version, server backup is configured via the Dashboard app, so I was wanting to know if it was supported?
Thanks,
This is possible and should work fine. If the local system fails you can also restore on the other server using this guide: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askpfeplat/2012/12/24/windows-server-2012-how-to-import-a-storage-pool-on-another-server/
One thing though, 4 eSATA drives doesn't sound reliable and scalable. If you need to add more disks later you'll have to rebuild the volume from scratch. At this scale I'd suggest using a small NAS to keep the disks gathered and managed in one enclosure and also have separate power supply (e.g. some of the Synology/WD units even offer redundant PSU)