disk backup of RAID5

[LeoB]

I am planning to do some disk based off-site backups, and I'm not sure how to procede with my DL380s. DL360s are easy, just break the RAID1 and you have an image.

For my DL380s, the disk config is RAID1 on disks 0 and 1 for the OS and RAID5 for the other 4 disks. I've read (see attached) that it's a bad idea to break the RAID1 if there are multiple arrays configured on a controller. I'd also like to preserve the data on the RAID5 off site on disk.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to procede?

Thanks in advance.

[Neal Bowman]

My only thought is to image the disks with tool similar to Ghost/Power Quest/etc, but this will require bringing the server down. I think Acronis True Image will do this while server is online. I have not had any experience with this. You can then save these images to a network location, restore to another server to test/validate the image.